He turned around and was about to tell the old man that he would build another machine, but the grave expression on Giovanni’s face stopped him.
“I’ve tried to build another time machine so I can go find her myself. But the blueprints were burned in the fire too.” Then he pointed to a drawing of an elaborate machine. “This is all I can remember, but it’s not enough to build the machine. Elizabeth helped me with the prototype. She was the one who discovered the missing connections in my design.”
“No.” Elizabeth lived, but there was no way to find her. He had given up on the two of them once; he would not so easily give up on them again. “No! I will find her.” He swore solemnly to Giovanni—to himself—as he backed out of the studio…
That was almost five centuries ago. He had been looking for Elizabeth since. Rei blinked his eyes twice to focus on the present. He was standing in front of two rather strange looking metal devices Rei recalled from the intel his men had gathered. These were retinal and hand scanners used for preventing unauthorized personnel from entering the premises. Nifty tools. Since his time travel ability was not technologically created but divinely derived, neither the Agency’s temporal alarm, nor these scanners, nor any devices on the premise, could prevent his coming and going. He simply walked up to the scanners as his men’s report suggested and let them scan his eyes and right hand. The system seemed confused for a moment, and then the metal double door simply hissed open. His smiled to himself.
According to the underground blueprints that his men had stolen, he was on the medical facilities level. The corridor was long, lined with white floor tiles, and the wall was painted in a muted beige color, which softened the fluorescent light glaring down from the ceiling.
Rei made a left at the end of the corridor, about thirty feet from the entrance. Two doors down, he found an empty janitor’s closet with brooms, mops, cleaning products, and a ladder. Perfect. He locked the closet from the inside and climbed up the ladder to the ceiling. He removed the ceiling tile, and as expected, found an airshaft duct. The blueprints showed this duct would lead him to the medical quarters where Skyla Gray should be now. Another piece of intel his men gathered was that TSCCA used a strict time-travel protocol for its agents to ensure their physical and mental safety. Any deviation from the protocols would place the person in quarantine for medical and psychological evaluations. And since he had thrown the female agent back to her present time with just a thought, she had to be under medical observation now.
He took out his boyhood compass, one of the very few mementos he was able to salvage after the war, and swung it in a full circle. Its needle directed him to the north wing, medical evaluation lab. As fluid as a panther, he leaped up from the ladder to the airshaft duct. It was dark and tight, his broad shoulders almost touching either side of the shaft. Good thing his night vision was excellent. Without another moment of delay, he crawled swiftly and silently through the duct, bearing north.
At the next opening, he peered down, and there she was—Agent Skyla Gray, sitting on the sofa, talking to someone.
Throwing herself down on the sofa in the medical quarters, Skyla called out to the back, “Hey, Knox!”
Now this was her kind of sofa, she immediately thought. Unlike the one in the director’s waiting area, this sofa was big enough to curl up comfortably on. It had a faint scent from the antique wood. The fabric cushions were well worn but still firm enough to provide support for any sitting position. In short, she much preferred waiting in Knox’s lab than the director’s office. No brainer.
She had known Knox and his twin sister, Vivi, since college. Besides her parents and Aunt Laura, the twins were the only other people with whom Skyla truly felt comfortable letting her guard down. The three of them met at Columbia University in Poli Sci 101 and became best friends almost immediately. After graduation, they went their separate ways. She signed up with the Secret Service. Vivi went for her master’s and PhD in aerospace engineering at Cal Tech. And Knox joined the Air Force before going to medical school at Johns Hopkins. Eventually, all three of them were recruited into TSCCA for their specific skill sets. Strange though it was, the fates had brought them together again.
“Hey, babe.” Knox looked up from his microscope. His broad smile always warmed her. She smiled back at him with great affection while watching him gently move whatever he was examining under the microscope into a small, clear container. Probably one of the infectious viruses he had been working on.
In his lab coat, he looked a bit geeky, sexy geeky, but if one paid closer attention, one could see the strong, lean muscles quietly moving underneath the plain white coat. He was a gorgeous man—tall, muscular, with golden-blond hair and cool, sky-blue eyes. Skyla swore she had seen a Norse god who looked just like Knox in one of her art history texts in college.
Instead of sitting next to her on the sofa, Knox leaned over her, bent down, and gave her a quick, sumptuous kiss on the mouth.
“Knox.” Giggling, she gently pushed him away. “We’ve talked about this many times.” She should’ve sounded put out, but she wasn’t. She still genuinely cared for him, even after their long-ago breakup after college graduation.
He took a seat next to her but purposely invaded her personal space, casually pressing his powerful thigh against hers. “I know. And you know how I feel about us.”
Feeling very tired all of a sudden from the dissipating adrenaline rush, Skyla rested her head on the back of the sofa. She spoke quietly with her eyes closed. “Knox, I can’t. We can’t.”
Silence. Skyla hated silence. She’d rather be yelled at—anything other than being treated with silence.
She waited a few moments—still silence. She reluctantly opened her eyes and turned to Knox. There was the same expression she had seen the morning after their graduation ceremony when they agreed to take a break from each other. She remembered the hurt in his eyes as he kissed her cheeks and said good-bye. When she told her parents about the breakup, her dad thought she had gone crazy. Later on, her mom told her that a month earlier, her dad had hinted to Knox of his approval of having him as his son-in-law. Her dad was right, of course, as always. Knox would be a great husband and father—but not for her. She knew that after her
twenty-first birthday.
Knox took her to dinner and dancing at the Rainbow Room. It was romantic, it was magical, yet part of her was holding back. That’s why she had never gone past second base with him. That was the night. She had planned the whole seduction scene after their celebratory night out. She purposely enticed him the whole evening with her throaty laughs, her soft body pressing against his hard, solid one whenever she could manage, and when they danced, she sinuously moved her soft body against his, letting him know she wanted him, badly. He finally had enough of her teasing and literally dragged her out of the restaurant and back to the three-bedroom townhouse apartment she shared with him and Vivi.
As soon as they closed the apartment door, Knox took the lead, stripping her of her barely-there satin-and-silk flapper dress and ran hot kisses along the trail of the falling dress. She should have been turned on. She was turned on at the restaurant, on the dance floor. But now all she felt was terror, the same kind of black terror she dreamed of often after her coma.
That’s when she screamed. She screamed with so much terror in her voice that Knox pushed himself off her, trying to console her. But the soul-chilling screams continued, and she started sobbing violently. Her fingers were literally clawing against the plaster wall like a desperately trapped animal seeking any means of escape.
“Skyla, Skyla…baby,” Knox’s gentle yet increasingly alarmed voice sounded so far away. That was the last thing she remembered before she blacked out.
She woke up the next morning with Knox holding her in her bed. She was in her comfy flannel PJs, and Knox had on his sweatshirt and pants. All very proper.
“Hey.” His concerned voiced vibrated through his chest where her head was lying.
“Hey.” She blinked twice before replying in resignation.
“How’re you feeling?” His hands gently stroking her back were similar to the way her mom used to soothe her from her dark, faceless nightmares.
“Okay.”
“Want to talk about what happened last night?” Knox brushed a kiss on top of her head.
She remembered bits and pieces of the night, her body going up in flame from their intense sensual play, and how much she wanted Knox to claim her. Then she remembered her own terrified screams. She had no recollection of what happened afterward.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know.” She spoke in a small voice. They remained silent in each other’s embrace for a while. After what felt like hours, she pushed up on her elbow and looked at him. “I used to have intense nightmares after the car crash. The doctor said it’s probably because my subconscious couldn’t process the event, so it manifested in my dreams. It stopped about a year later, around the time I started at Columbia and right before I met you and Vivi.” She looked away from him. “Last night, out of nowhere, I felt the same terror when you…your…well, you know.” She trailed off, feeling her face getting warmer by the second.
Knox drew her back down and wrapped his arms around her protectively. “It’s okay. You don’t have to explain anything. I’m just glad you’re better now.” He sounded worried, and there was a hint of hurt in his voice. She felt even smaller at that moment. What was wrong with her? She cared for and loved Knox. They had been going out for over a year now, were each other’s best friend. Why couldn’t she take their relationship to the next level, to lovers?
After that night, their relationship changed. Knox never tried to do more than give her a quick kiss on the lips. Then their senior year, final exams came, and they both got busy with their schoolwork. The intimate emotional bond she had with Knox faded away rapidly. The day after their graduation, she and Knox said their good-byes. Neither of them spoke of breaking up, but they both knew it was the end.
That was seven years ago. Skyla had never really dated anyone since then. Causal flirting, yes, but nothing that ever came close to exclusive dating like she and Knox had. When she ran into Knox at TSCCA a couple years ago, she just didn’t feel right about picking up where they had left off. But Knox thought otherwise. He had been subtly hinting that he still wanted her and that he wanted a second try. And lately, his behavior toward her was borderline territorial. She knew most of the guys at TSCCA already thought Knox was staking a claim on her. The misconceived notion did come in handy. It helped her evade unwarranted romantic attention from both inside and outside the Agency. The thought made her smile a little.
Before she could give Knox the same speech about how their time together had run its course and that she was comfortable being single, the doors to the medical quarters opened.
“Hey, guys.” Vivi walked in with a stack of boxes. “Knox, here are the tissue samples from our last mission.”
Skyla was relieved by the interruption. Yep, she was a master at avoidance.
Vivi was the pet name she and Knox had had for her since college. Vivi adored it, but only Knox, Skyla, and the rest of their team were allowed to use it. The last time a new recruit made the mistake of trying to be friendly and called her Vivi, he ended up stuck in some godforsaken medieval period during a mission. Vivi simply, conveniently, left him behind after the mission was completed and didn’t go back to retrieve him for twenty-four hours. It was a quick surveillance mission with just the two of them. Their gear hadn’t included any survival packages, nor did they carry any weapons—not that modern weapons would have worked when travelling back in time, anyway. So the new recruit had to survive the rough, ancient terrain, fending off wild animals and blood-thirsty warlords with nothing but his bare knuckles and a couple of daggers for almost a day and night. After that, the new recruit only addressed Vivi as “ma’am,” and no one else had tried to call her by any other name but Vivienne from then on. Skyla smiled fondly at the history she shared with the twins.
Knox looked at her a moment longer, as if he was trying to look into her soul, before he got up and took the boxes from his sister.
Vivi immediately took her brother’s seat on the sofa. “Skyla, you look pale. Has Knox checked you out yet?”
“I was about to when
someone
barged in,” Knox answered for her as he walked to the back of his lab.
“Don’t worry, Vivi. I’m fine. Just a bit disoriented. That’s all.”
Vivi was not as tall as her brother but was still no shrimp. At five-feet-ten, her legs were miles long. She had the perfect supermodel body of the 1990s—athletic yet voluptuous, the all-American girl. Unlike Knox’s pale blond Viking complexion, Vivi had midnight blue-black hair set off by emerald-green eyes that looked like the North Star guiding mortal souls into the night. Even though they were twins, she and her brother couldn’t have been more different in terms of temperament. Knox was reserved and methodical from the years of his medical research in the field of infectious diseases and his hands-on training with an elite Air Force squadron. Vivi, in contrast, was vibrant and action-oriented. She seemed to have an unlimited amount of energy and was a daredevil in all sorts of extreme sports. After she received her PhD in aerospace engineering, she could’ve joined NASA and been the first female commander pilot in its space program, but she had chosen TSCCA instead. Once, Skyla asked Vivi why she didn’t go for her girlhood dream of being the first female space shuttle commander. Vivi just shrugged her shoulder and answered nonchalantly, “Why would I want to do simulation programs for most of my waking hours when I could be fighting bad guys while flying through time?” That was Vivi’s trademark—wickedly sharp logic.
“So what did happen back there? You were gone not even five minutes. One minute we got your engaged signal, next minute you’re back.” Vivi leaned her head and her side against the back of the sofa as if they were at a pajama party, not working inside one of the most advanced secret government agencies on the planet.