Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(55)
She yawned and sat up, and noticed the roaring fire a few meters away. A small part of her sighed; so much for the bad dream. That meant—she looked over to her right—James was actually real and she was in a world of bad juju.
“You’re up.” His voice bounced around the room. “How are you feeling?”
Elise took a moment and suppressed the first, panicked thought that popped into her head. She forced her body to inhale a few deep breaths and not to say how she really felt because she knew she’d regret saying the words to him later. In fact, she decided not to say anything at all. No good would have come of her flight reflex kicking up full tilt and her running screaming out of the room.
Instead, she waited until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She was sitting in the center of a dirty floor in what looked like a large husk of a building, with cracks streaking the concrete walls and floor. There were large square openings along the walls where once there might have been windowpanes. Everything was at a slant. She could hear waves crashing in the distance, but other than that and the crackling fire spitting sparks into the air, it was eerily silent.
She opened her mouth to say something and her nerves put new words in her mouth. She groaned and rubbed her bruised jaw. “My face hurts.”
“I’m sorry for that. I handled those two monitors.”
Elise didn’t like the vicious sound of that, but her body aching from their beating told her brain to let that one go. She stretched her arms out and pulled herself to her feet. “What happened? Last thing I remember was lying on the ground, then you showed up, and then the rumbling of your spaceship lulled me to sleep.”
“Bringing you back has caused some … issues,” he said. “I wasn’t—”
“Supposed to do that?” Elise said, still massaging her jaw to make sure everything worked. “No kidding, James. I could have told you that when we were at the hotel. Your face had turned sheet white—well, whiter than it already is—by the time we got to the room. Then when you left … you really messed up big-time, didn’t you, bringing me back from the past?”
He nodded.
“How did you do it, anyway? How is time traveling possible?”
James shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Elise was flabbergasted. “Wait, what do you mean, you don’t know? You’re a time traveler. That’s what you do.”
“I’m a user, not a builder. I fly the collie. I have no idea how that engine works.” He held up his arm. “I use these bands. I could care less what makes the exo power up or how the rad band protects me from radiation. Time traveling is the same way. There are people who build the technology and there are those, like me, who use it. There are not enough lifetimes for a person to know both.”
Elise looked around at the moss-and dirt-covered walls, and brushed her fingers along the grimy floor. Everything was damp, even the air. This world had a worn and tired look to it, as if the entire planet was slowly melting. Decaying. Even the rocks at her feet looked sad.
She should be grateful she was still alive; she knew that. However, much to her chagrin, as much as she tried to be grateful, she couldn’t find the silver lining to anything that had happened. After all, her beloved Earth was a wreck and she had been assaulted by the authorities on her very first day. She might as well be dead.
“Send me back,” she said. “Back to my time. Wouldn’t that solve everything?”
James shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. You’re considered out of sync with your time period based on your physical and chronological location. Time traveling creates tears in the chronostream that forever prevent anyone from jumping to that time and place again. I’m sorry; you can never return to your natural sync.”
“Well, how the hell do you do it, then? And wouldn’t jumping back create a tear too?”
James held up his armful of metal bands and pointed at one of them. “My jump band acts as an anchor that keeps me in sync with the present and pulls me back on my return jumps. Tears are only created during initial jumps. We’re essentially punching holes into the fabric of time, and the anchor allows me to return to the present by pulling me back through the same hole. You weren’t wearing one when we jumped.”
“How about you send me back to my time but somewhere else then? I wouldn’t want to go back to Nutris anyway, on account of all that radiation, but just, I dunno, drop me off in Mo’orea. Or New Zealand.”
James shook his head. “I could do that, but the auditors—the police force within ChronoCom—will detect that you are out of sync. They’ll send someone back to eliminate the discrepancy.”
Being called a “discrepancy” sounded sort of insulting. Elise mulled things over. Quantum physics wasn’t really her thing after all. “Well, that sucks” was her final analysis. Waxing eloquently about being trapped in an awful situation wasn’t her thing either.
She could feel the slight angle at which the floor slanted, reminding her of her vacation as a kid climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa before it actually toppled over. She walked to one of the large square openings and poked her head outside. It was completely dark, but she could make out the faint outline of other buildings. They were in a city that stretched to both sides as far as her eye could see. She looked down. On the ground level, ocean water flowed freely through the streets, crashing against the buildings as if they were in a canal. A sharp, pointy-topped building at the end of the street had completely toppled over at the base and looked like a syringe sticking out of the ground.