The Time Travel Chronicles (6 page)

“Never mind.” Abigail sighed, sensing my platitude. She was searching for a deeper connection, something to fill the void Taylor had left.

“My brother served in the Army,” I said, revisiting a memory that time had robbed of its potency. I felt numb and somehow that made it worse. “He was on a peacekeeping mission, defending a food refinery from some third world warlord with dreams of being king.”

“He was time-locked?”

I nodded. “The Warlord purchased three Chrono-mercenaries from Crask. And that’s all it took; they slaughtered my brother’s entire platoon.” I paused, fingers twisted up in the thin sheets covering Abi’s bed. “My dad never looked at me the same way again. I figured he blamed me for not being there to save my brother, but after a couple years here at Central I realized it wasn’t that; I was just another Chrono to him, no different than the one who murdered my brother.”

“Do you still miss him? Your brother, I mean?”

I was ashamed to admit I rarely thought about him anymore. Time had slowly, minute by minute, stolen his memory from me.

“Sometimes,” I said, unsure if that was the answer she wanted to hear.

Abi nodded, tears rolling down her cheek. After a long while she said, “I see Taylor whenever I close my eyes, but he’s always covered in blood. I can’t remember him before that moment.”

I recalled Abi, lying curled up in the leaves beside Taylor’s body where we’d found her soaked in his blood. The bullet had caught him in the throat; he was dead seconds after hitting the ground. An awful mess.

“It’s my fault,” she said.

I stroked her hair as she silently sobbed.

“I keep thinking this is all a bad dream. That I’m gonna wake up at any moment in my own bed and he’ll be there, hogging the blankets, smelly breath and snoring and…” Her voice hitched, stumbling over itself.

I didn’t know what to say or where to begin. I sat there, failing her a little more with each passing second.

“It’ll get easier, Abi. Just give it time.” I said the words because that’s what you’re supposed to say. But in my heart, I knew it was a lie.

I think she knew, too.

Chapter Thirteen

NOW

“I watched Taylor die forty-seven times.” Abi’s sudden calm was chilling, utterly unaffected by Zoe struggling against her grip. “We swept the perimeter like you told us to. Everything was fine, and then it wasn’t. All it took was a second, just one, for everything to break.

“He was just…laying there. Staring up at me with those eyes, begging me to help. His lips were moving, but nothing came out. I covered the hole with my fingers, but there was so much blood and it was so hot. It burned. I was falling down this bottomless pit inside myself, Kae. I couldn’t control it. You never taught me how to control something like that.”

Abigail paused, her chest heaving with the remembrance of raw pain still so fresh. “My body kept blinking back; four seconds each time. Right before the gunshot. I relived that moment over and over and over…If only I could have gone one second further—” Abi held up a single trembling finger, “—I could have shoved him out of the way.”

Abi’s confession tore at me. I hadn’t realized how badly she’d been hurt that night. Perhaps part of me hadn’t wanted to know. Hadn’t wanted to carry the burden of that knowledge.

“Eventually I just cracked. I broke.” Abigail looked up, her pupils were flaring spheres of sapphire. “I was too weak to save him. But not anymore.”

Rivulets of tachyon-enriched fluid dripped from her hair. Falling slowly in thick droplets. Zoe was right, she hadn’t been taken—she’d come to Crask to change the past.

“Abi, you can’t do it. You can’t go back.”

“Why not?” she said defiantly.

“Because it’s an infinite loop.”

“That’s what you say, but you could be wrong. Crask says you’re wrong.”

“He’s using you. You know that!”

“Honestly, it doesn’t even matter,” Abigail said. She suddenly seemed so old, so tired. “It can’t be any worse than staying. At least this way I’ll get to see him again.”

“Please, Abi,” I pleaded, desperate to find the right combination of words that would make her see reason. “Don’t do this—”

“Sorry about your ribs, Maddix.”

Maddix made a noise not unlike a chuckle.

“I’m sorry for all of this. I knew you guys would try and stop me, but I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. You’re all family.”

My mouth moved but nothing came out.

Abigail smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen her wear. “Goodbye, Kae.” And then she shoved Zoe away.

The smile vanished along with the light in her eyes in an instant. Abigail stood as still as a mannequin, her eyes scanning, wide and suddenly frightened. The blue fire had been quenched, her tachyons used up in a single massive blink. No sign of her once fierce intelligence, or the heart so innocent it could only break beneath the strain of a world too cruel.

All that remained was the shell of a friend and a past I couldn’t fix.

Chapter Fourteen

NOW

“Get up, Maddix. We’re leaving,” Zoe said, striding to the door through which we’d entered. It was locked. “Shit.”

I stared numbly at Abigail’s vacant expression, swimming through thoughts of how I’d failed her. Zoe shook me hard.

“Kae, I need you,” she said. “Don’t fall apart on me, okay?”

I nodded slowly, forcing away the thoughts of Abigail holding me paralyzed.

Lionel Crask’s overly enunciated voice piped into the room via invisible speakers. “Agent Kwon, you and your team are no longer welcome here.”

“Were we ever?” Maddix said, grunting to his feet and clutching his ribs.

“Young Abigail requested an opportunity to say goodbye face to face,” Crask said. “Your presence has fulfilled that contractual obligation. Now I would like you to leave.”

“You went too far, Crask,” I said through gritted teeth. “Abigail was emotionally unstable. You took advantage of that. You killed her.”

“She and I had a business arrangement; she wanted to go back and I needed another blinker. We both got what we wanted.”

“You handed her a loaded gun.”

“Yes, I did,” Crask agreed. “I gave her the strength to claim her legacy. To become mo-”

“Save your proselytizing for someone who’ll actually buy it. You’re just a power hungry thug preying on the vulnerable.”

“Every ecosystem has a predator, I suppose,” he said unapologetically.

I shook my head, frustrated not so much with Crask and what he’d done, but with myself and what I hadn’t. I should have seen it coming. I should have done more.

“Now,” Crask continued, “per my contract with Abigail, her body is now the property of Crask Incorporated.”

“You’re out of your mind if you think we’re giving her to you.”

“It goes without saying that he’s out of his mind,” Maddix said, searching the room alongside Zoe for some means of escape.

Crask ignored Maddix and said, “Agent Kwon, I sealed your compartment well over a minute ago while you were preoccupied with Abigail. Blinking will do you no good.” A hidden wall panel slid back, revealing a trio of paralysis rings. “Now, please see yourselves over to the detainment bands, and we’ll see about getting you back to your ship in one piece.”

“We’re not gonna do that.” Maddix stepped away from the wall. “Right?”

“Nope,” Zoe agreed. “Definitely not.”

“Then I’ll vent the room of oxygen, wait until you pass out, and then my men will detain you,” Crask said. “But understand, I’ve lost a dozen good followers on account of this farewell meeting. That was the price of doing business. I hold no ill will towards any of you. I’m prepared to let you leave, unharmed, if onl—”

“I’m not giving you Abigail.”

“She is not yours to give. You have no bargaining power here. You are trespassing on my property, you live at my discretion. For the sake of what remains of your team, do the smart thing and make this easy on yourselves.”

“Abi is still a part of my team.”

Crask’s laugh came high and tinny through the speakers. “Abigail is gone. You owe h—”

“Is anybody else tired of listening to this guy?” Zoe asked, removing a silver cylinder from her bandolier. Maddix raised his hand.

“I wouldn’t recomm—” Crask began to say.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Resistance is futile. We’ve heard it before.” Zoe thumbed the thermobaric grenade and tossed it at the downward slanting window with the stellar view of Hong Kong, and then she tackled me into the bathroom.

Maddix blitzed over to Abigail, picked her up, and dove for the tachyon bath chamber.

The explosion was deafening. My eardrums popped from the violent shift in pressure. I covered my head; it didn’t help. It felt as though somebody were jamming knitting needles through my ear canal and stirring my brain.

Somebody shook me. I opened my eyes and Zoe slapped me, which did nothing for the ache in my skull, but did snap me back to a semblance of coherency. She yanked me to my feet and dragged me to the jagged hole ripped in Haven’s hull. Maddix appeared on my right, carrying Abigail over his shoulder.

Colby’s hover-jet came screaming towards Haven. Its engines at a high-pitched squeal.

“Did you call him?” I asked Zoe, but the words must have come out wrong because she didn’t reply.

The jet angled its strafing run to pass within a few feet of us, its cargo bay door open wide. And then its roaring engines came to a shuddering stop along with its forward momentum. Red tracer fire from Haven’s anti-air cannons froze in mid-air behind the jet. The chaos of the moment settled.

Beside me, Zoe’s pupils were white, her face strained. She held my hand and Maddix’s, pulling us both into her pause.

The exposure couldn’t touch me. I had no room in my broken heart for fear of falling. Free for the moment from the constraints of time, the three of us leapt for the hover-jet.

Chapter Fifteen

NOW

Abigail knelt on the multi-colored carpet beside Matilda, stacking blocks.

“I never did tell you why Mati went back,” I said, watching the two carry on with no concern for me. “Same reason we all eventually go back. You can’t escape the memories. It’s the toll blinking takes on us. Of living with one foot in the future and the other in the past.”

Abi had figured that one out on her own.

“All those moments rewritten become a part of you, forever and for always.” I fiddled with a faded orange block, turning it over and over between my fingers, staring hard at the ground while saying all the things I couldn’t while Abi was still alive. “Eventually we all get crushed beneath the weight of the past. But I was too weak to tell you that.”

“I needed you to stay.” Moisture pooled in the corner of my eye. I didn’t look up. “To give me a reason not to go back myself. ‘Cause as long as you were here, I didn’t feel so bad for staying.”

“I miss you both,” I said, but neither Mati nor Abi acknowledged my admission. “Your absences…these memories of moments I can’t fix, they’re grinding away at me. And yet I’m too afraid to join you, ‘cause all I keep thinking is: what if they were wrong?”

“Does choosing to stay make me weak?” I paused, waiting for assurances that would never come.

How much longer can I last?

I thought of Zoe and Maddix, of their inescapable futures; we all carried our crosses. I couldn’t abandon them. Couldn’t leave them incapable of rewriting that wrong.

Abigail searched the floor with questing eyes. I handed her my orange block and she took it, smiling.

People still needed me. That, I suppose, was reason enough to stay. For just a while longer, at least.

A Word from Anthony Vicino

We’ve all wanted it at one time or another. To go back and try again, to do it better, to do it
right.

Whether that be after your first thorough heart stomping when the one you love said, “It’s not me, it’s you”, and left you bitter and hurting and clutching at the burnt out remains of that once beautiful thing; or the time you were faced with mortality in the suffering eyes of a loved one you just assumed would always be there, living forever because surely death is something that only happens to other people, not to you or the ones you love; or perhaps it was the time you made a decision so costly that the price is one you’ll be paying for the rest of your life.

Time travel fascinates me because we all do it in some form. Reliving memories, playing them through our mind’s eye, forward and back. Sometimes pretending we said something different—something funnier or something more heartfelt. Other times nothing changes, and we relive a moment precisely as we remember it. Whether that be the blissful moment of a father first holding his newborn daughter, or the self-flagellating punishment he felt when she came home from school in tears and there was nothing he could do to make it better; we all live in the past to one degree or another.