“Maybe.” If they were talking a walk into crazy, she didn’t want to go first.
Now his grip tightened. “I can get us home, even without the bug. I—” He hesitated, as if what he wanted to say was harder to believe than what was currently on the table. “I just need to take a look around and then we’ll…go. Can you stick close while I do that?”
She nodded again. Sticking close was good. She liked close. She could do stick, too. That was even better than close. One of his hands slid down her arm, the fingers meshing with hers, his grip just shy of painful. She let him turn them, though she stayed close enough to his side—purely in the interests of sticking—that walking was challenging for them both. He didn’t say anything, but the side of his mouth did that half smile quirk again. Thinking tried to happen inside her head. She didn’t have to be smart to know that would be dumb. Thinking could only lead to panic. He hadn’t said don’t panic, but the words were implied in the question. Besides the panic, thinking might lead to questions. She didn’t want to imagine the kind of answers she’d get with time travel on the table, even if neither of them had said it out loud.
Leaving the thought inside her head didn’t help as much as she’d hoped. She let her mind cautiously approach the idea of actual, real time travel from her stuck position against Robert. On the one hand, she was into steampunk, so of course she believed in time travel. And alternate realities and universes, but—
Believe or don’t believe, just don’t be wishy-washy about it
. Words of her Grandma, words she’d had no trouble living by until today.
Believe or don’t believe
. He believed. Maybe she could believe in him and let the rest of it find its level or drain away. It was a sad fact, universally acknowledged by no one but her that she wanted to believe him no matter what crazy place they might be heading. But, and this was a big one, aside from her desire to not be gullible, there were some actual facts in the column of supporting evidence.
Running into Uncle E in the desert topped the list, of course, though he seemed to have vanished with the bug. Not a happy line of thought, so she mentally returned to the time travel evidence. It felt very
Law and Order
to think of it that way. Robert had had the key to the bug. He knew the combination to unlock the bug and other things about it. And Carey talked like he knew stuff about it, too. Robert wasn’t at all surprised by being…here. The distant call of a newsie kicked at the legs of her precarious calm. A horse whinnied close to the double wooden doors. Light poked through a hundred breaches in the walls, enough to provide dim light as Robert headed for the filing cabinet again. He needed his hand, so she shifted her grip to his upper arm and looked down at the desk. Uncle E’s desk. His actual desk? A newspaper lay askew atop a pile of papers and other stuff. The headline was big and bold, but it was the date that caught her attention.
May 3, 1894.
Two weeks before Uncle E’s vanishing act. If one didn’t count his reappearance, and re-disappearance…if she’d had any doubt where she was, the newspaper did a lot to erase it—
They didn’t sketch it the way they found it.
Great-great-great grandma and her sibs had faked it. It was kind of funny. And much easier to think about than time travel. When her body and thoughts unfroze she might just laugh. Those drawings were a cleaned up version of this. They’d edited out as much of the warehouse as they could, too. It must have embarrassed them that he lived and worked in a place like this. The heat, the smell, the sounds made it more…lowbrow—a place Emily had no problem with since she lived in lowbrow the same way she lived in sad. So much for their faithful accuracy. She soaked it in, a bubble of laughter rising in her throat and beads of sweat running down her back inside the duster coat. Sweat was real. The heat was real. The sounds were real, too. And just like that she felt her thoughts adjust. She was in 1894. She was in the past. She took a steadying breath. The world didn’t implode around her. Even felt a kind of glow of virtue at not melting down.
Way weird
. She looked around her because weird made her knees wobbly even if she didn’t melt down. It’s not like she was a stranger to crazy.
She’d seen the bug appear.
She’d traveled in it to Roswell. Had that been the past, too? Could she have seen, with her own eyes, the original Roswell alien event? That might be cooler than meeting her not-dead-then-dead-again great uncle.
Even more amazing, had she seen it and failed to take a single picture with her cell phone? Time travel? No problem. Failing to record it? Stupid! She dug around for her phone, her fingers brushing against the Emergency Absquatulation Device. Felt a bit of unease about that now that they’d kissed and stuff, but not enough to give it back. Robert might be persuaded to let her keep it, but that not-Jones? No way. She moved on, her fingers closing around her phone, careful not to break contact with Robert, though she wasn’t sure why she felt it was critical to stay in physical contact, other than the whole hot-for-him aspect, and he’d asked her to, so she should, because he asked. It kind of balanced out grabbing the EAD. Maybe.
“What are you doing?” He sounded amused and maybe a bit bemused?
“Getting pictures. Being pissed with myself for not getting some at Roswell.”
She felt him kick into thinking overdrive. The hum of his body was different from the steam engine, but she still felt it, felt temptation and caution go to war. Or she had a really good imagination.
“I don’t think we should.” His frown said he wasn’t sure why. “Time is resilient, persistent…resistant?” He rubbed between his brows and sighed. “I didn’t believe it, but the proof is irrefutable.”
It was difficult to come up with a comment for that. Proof was always irrefutable until it was refuted. She didn’t know where he was going with this. Wasn’t sure he knew where he was going. Couldn’t find out without asking.
He looked at her, his gaze pinning her in place. “Close your eyes.”
Her brows arched, though the question didn’t make it anywhere near her throat. As if he knew this and was willing to work around her issue with questions, he gave her that half smile, with a bit of crooked to it.
“You sense things I don’t. Would you mind trying?”
When he asked like that? “Okay.” What wouldn’t she do if he asked her like that? Not sure she wanted to answer that question, even alone inside her own head—a mental pause here when she realized she didn’t feel alone in her head. A mental shake at that. Of course she was alone. Too far into crazy. The thought side trip didn’t take long enough to make Robert restive as he waited for her to comply with his request. Next problem, her lids didn’t like shutting out the sight of him. Her eyes liked looking at him, liked it better when he looked at her. She dragged them down. With the loss of light other senses kicked on. Smell first. The warehouse was gnarly, no question, but Robert was close enough to trump that. He smelled real good. She didn’t try to sort his scent, just enjoyed it. Sounds outside kicked up a bit, too. A soft rustle of paper close at hand, then another one, a different piece? On its heels, as if something had been waiting for that, she felt a mini version of a bug ride. Her eyes snapped open. Her mouth might have sagged a bit, too. His arm came around her waist, supporting her.
He held one of Uncle E’s papers. “You felt something.”
She nodded. He reinserted it in the drawer and the feeling smoothed out.
“You have a heightened sensitivity to time.”
She wasn’t sure she believed his specific claim, but something weird was going on. She considered her family history. Something weird had been going on for a very long time. He watched her, those blue eyes fixed on her, not anxiously, but with a high level of intent. Regardless of what she believed, he believed it, she realized, not with shock, but with relief. He wasn’t lying to her. She hated lying. Crazy, she could handle.
“Okay.” She was pleased with the neutral nature of her reply. It lacked judgment or agreement. It was.
His eyes had questions in them that Emily didn’t know how to answer without also unleashing a firestorm of questions. If she got answers like this without asking, what might she get if she asked?
He grinned, the first real one he’d produced since she’d met him—she tried to work out how long she’d known him and couldn’t. She didn’t know how to do math that involved negative sums and travel through time.
“You felt something when I took that paper out,” his finger flicked the edge of it and a lighter version of that weird feeling danced across her nerve endings, “but you didn’t react to this one.” He touched a new file and she had to admit—to herself—he was right. There was something about the other file that bothered her. She angled her head to read the label and the room tilted on its side. Robert gripped her, half lifting her to her uncle’s chair. It felt weird to sit there, but not for the same reason. According to family legend, no one but Uncle E had ever sat there, though she wondered about that after the hinking with the drawings done by his siblings. They’d probably all bounced in it more than once.
Robert crouched in front of her, clasping both her hands so he could look at her, forcing her to gaze into his sincere, and beautiful blue eyes. Little tingles of feeling much better than that other stuff crawled up her arms and dived into her middle, warming it into a nice glow. Did he think she didn’t know where he was headed? He was going to say—okay so maybe she didn’t know where he was headed. Or she didn’t want to go there before she had to.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded, then wished she hadn’t, because he stood up. At least he didn’t let go. Questions bubbled inside her with a previously unknown insistence but each came with a
Danger, Will Robinson
attached. “So no pictures.”
He nodded. “We need to get out of here before—”
It was like bad karma, because as soon as he said “before” they heard a rattle at the door at the top of those stairs. Robert moved so fast, Emily felt like she was back in the bug, only this trip was behind some crates and involved more pleasant clasping. She angled her feet, feeling for floor and couldn’t. Not only wasn’t Robert breathing heavy from hoisting her up and out of sight, he was barely breathing.
Oh my darling.
The deliberate sound of booted feet descending the stairs made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. That sense of—was it time like Robert said—skewing wrong made her stomach lurch this time. She slid her arms up Robert’s shoulders and around his neck. There might have been some clutching. That and closing her eyes helped settle her stomach. She knew when whoever it was reached the bottom of the stairs because Robert tensed.
Smith!
He’d spoken so soft it felt like she heard him in her head, which was impossible. Not that there hadn’t been plenty of impossible to go around since he’d walked into her bowling alley.
“Emelius?”
It was obvious no one was there, so why the hesitant call, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to find Emelius? Or was afraid he would find him? Robert didn’t trust him—she didn’t waste time wondering how she knew that—because her thoughts got hooked on wondering if this was
the
Professor Smith
, the other suspect in the disappearance. Her heart bumped up the pounding, which made it hard to slow her breathing in the deep, dangerous quiet. Dangerous? Okay, so getting seen by someone in the past was bad. She knew her fictional time travel science. The grandfather paradox and stuff. Science stuff, but this was more than that.
Robert shifted, the movement in the ghost range of quiet. She opened her eyes and the room didn’t lurch, but things still felt off, like bad food. Through a gap in the crates she saw a tall man, and burly, wearing clothing appropriate to the period—if one overlooked the gizmo he held. Her uncle had made some weird stuff, but it had looked like 1894. This didn’t. This looked like something straight out of
Wild Wild West
. Wires and steam and flashing lights. He frowned down at it, then looked up, his hard gaze scanning the room as if he sensed their presence.
He was dressed right, but he was wrong in those clothes. She knew it as someone who’d been schooled in the time by her obsessed family. He held himself like a soldier, not a gentleman. Will Robinson was feeling that danger call again. Confirmation on that danger when Smith turned the gizmo their direction and it started to hiss louder.
Robert shifted, putting the craft between them and Smith. “Time to go.” His voice was a murmur for her ears alone. “Hang on.”
Booted steps tracked their direction, but then space bent around them. Emily felt something grab her middle and yank. Robert still held her, but how it felt, how he held her felt different from before. Lights bent. So did they. This was like the bug trips, but not. And then it stopped. Again.
SIXTEEN
Doc—Delilah Oliver Clementyne—got the signal she’d been waiting for, the signal that the portal retrieval program had gone active, via her nanite peeps seconds before it came in over her headset. She headed for the portal room with controlled speed. The instinct to not attract attention had not lessened, even with her high profile marriage, or perhaps because of it. Whatever the reason, she still knew how to muddy a trail. No one from the future would be able to come back and mess with her life. She’d made sure of that.
Hel was across the outpost—putting a bit of stress on their
ma’rasile
link—dealing with a diplomatic something or other. He tried to keep her and diplomatic things as far apart as possible—since her idea of diplomacy involved weapons and body slams—but he got the peep call the same time she did.
Is my presence required?
It warmed her that he was willing to come. He knew she’d worried about sending Robert on this op, even though she had been unable to extrapolate a downside to a visit to a museum and bowling alley. Still, relief came in a flood. He’d started back. While she categorically denied Hel’s assertion that she hovered, she’d be glad when her big brother was back where she could see him. From a distance that wasn’t at all like hovering.