Nomad (6 page)

Raven and Kari had drifted from one resistance group to another over the years, but they had always stuck together, until the final mission.

Raven understood. Her data cube was filled with nothing but information about the future dictator, and she had traveled back in time with a gun. Her mission, she thought, was becoming obvious.

Chapter Six

Raven reached the Port Authority building in New York at two in the morning. She had barely slept during the bus ride, waking every ten minutes to check her surroundings, as though her body had an internal alarm clock that didn't want her to grow too comfortable.

During a layover in Philadelphia, she'd visited a sprawling discount store and purchased clothes to help her blend better with the locals. She hadn't seen other women in combat boots and fatigues, so she'd bought sneakers, comfortable dark blue jeans, and a simple white blouse to lower her profile a bit.

She searched the cavernous, fluorescent-lit Port Authority terminal for a place where she could sit with her back to a wall and her eyes on the crowd. She had several hours to kill before the bus to New Haven.

Even at this late hour, people flowed in every direction in the crowded terminal. Travelers from a wide range of races and nationalities lugged their suitcases across the tiled floor, the women dressed in everything from burkhas to hooker boots. Raven moved along with the crowd, keeping her head low.

A young man approached from the opposite direction and tried to lock eyes with her. His interest in her felt like a threat, and she swerved to avoid him.

He stopped walking and looked her over. From the corner of her eye, she saw him turn back and approach her again, and she prepared to block and counterstrike.

He looked dangerous, his blond bangs dirty and unkempt, his irises a stormy dark gray. His sharp cheekbones were prominent under his eyes, and he clearly hadn't shaved in days. He wore ragged clothes, with holes in his dark plaid shirt and worn-out jeans. He was a few years older than her, in his early or middle twenties.

"You look like you've had a rough ride," he said. His voice was low and quiet as he followed alongside her.

She kept walking and didn't acknowledge him. If he tried to attack, she would have to break his arm, and that would draw everyone's attention.

"New York Port Authority," he said, gesturing to the multinational crowd around them. "A good spot for a couple of time travelers to meet, don't you think?"

Time travelers?
Raven tried not to let the surprise show on her face. She slowed to look him over. Was he somebody she knew? She didn't feel the slightest hint of recognition, but most of her mind was lost in its fog of amnesia.

"Let my buy you a coffee, Raven," he said. "There's a horrible-looking vending machine over this way. Your bus doesn't leave for a few hours, right? You told me this was a long, dull, kind of scary night at the bus terminal."

"I told you what? When?"

"In the future. Coffee?" He pointed back over his shoulder.

"In the future," Raven repeated, not sure what else to say. Her instincts told her to run, but this strange man knew her name. He might know other things that could loosen up her memories.

"Don't act like you've never been to the future." He grinned. His teeth, unlike the rest of him, didn't look like they belonged to a homeless, hungry drug addict. They were perfectly straight and porcelain-white, and they made the rest of his appearance seem like a disguise. "I need to talk to you for a second. What else did you have planned? Nothing. I already know that. That's why I came...that's why you sent me back to this night, after you've arrived in 2013, but before you reach New Haven--"

"Sh!" she snapped.

"Coffee?" he offered again.

"I want a coffee anyway," she said. "Just keep your voice down about where I'm going. Anyway, I'm not going...where you said."

"All I know is what you told me." He led her through a spacious area that looked like a shopping mall, but the lights were off and the gates were down for the night.

While the coffee vending machine churned and spat mysterious black fluid into paper cups, Raven studied the strange young man. He'd turned his back to her while he got the coffee, as though he trusted her. She didn't see any obvious guns under his clothes, but plenty of deadly weapons could be concealed.

Though he acted familiar, she didn't trust him enough to tell him about her amnesia. That put her in a difficult place, because she couldn't even ask his name without tipping him off.

"Solid black, just the way you like it." He handed her a hot paper cup and looked at her carefully with his unusual eyes. "Isn't it?"

"Maybe." She took the coffee from him. It tasted strong but foul, and she grimaced. "I like my coffee black, but I don't think this is coffee. It's more like tar, with just a subtle hint of paint thinner."

"I promised you the best, and I lied." He forced himself to swallow a mouthful of his own coffee. They sat at a table in front of a closed fast-food restaurant, in chairs that had been chained to the table for the night. "So, how's that secret mission going so far?"

"I don't know what you mean," she told him, and he laughed. Then he looked at her again, in his overly familiar way.

"Do you still have the amnesia?" he asked, and she jumped. "I nearly forgot that part. Ha ha, I forgot the amnesia. It's from an explosion when you made your first jump through time, right? That must have been nice and confusing, finding yourself in the past with no memory of who you are. Are you over that yet? Are you home in there? Or is it still a blank?"

"How do you know these things?" she whispered, leaning closer to him. She looked up and down the mall area, searching for saw-toothed drones or security agents in power armor.

"You told me about it. You and I are...friends." He hesitated before picking the word, and she wondered why. "We will be, anyway, in
your
future. We haven't met yet. Except, now, we have, and so your future has changed. Does that make sense?"

"I wouldn't say so."

"Especially not with the amnesia. Let's start this way: You're from the future. You've traveled back from...when was it? 2063? 2064? Let's check your timepiece." He reached for the moonstone bracelet on her arm and circled his fingertip around the edge of the stone. "Activate," he whispered.

She jumped again when a glowing blue circle appeared in the air above the stone, a translucent hologram. It gave the current date and time down to the nanosecond, and the map location of the New York Port Authority, 40.7574 degrees north by 73.9931 degrees west. The circle was surrounded by thin concentric rings, and as he touched his finger to different rings, the numbers in the center changed.

"There's your current location...here's where you jumped in...and here's where you originated, the year 2064. Thirty-two north, one-oh-six west...I'm guessing the American Southwest, somewhere around Utah."

"2064." Raven shook her head. "If I started out in Utah, why did I land in Kentucky?"

"Couldn't tell you," he said. "You traveled back about fifty years, anyway, to carry out your mission."

"What mission?" Raven tried to sound sarcastic, as though she didn't know what he meant, but she had a pretty good idea of why she'd traveled through time.

He gave her a thoughtful look, then shook his head.

"I don't want to intervene too much," he told her. "As little as possible, actually. You figured out your mission the first time, so I don't want to change things by telling you before you're supposed to know."

"What do you mean? How are you intervening?"

"The first time around, I didn't come back to see you. We never had this conversation. You sat alone at the Port Authority and ticked away the hours until you could finally board the bus to Connecticut--"

"Could you please not say that?" Raven glanced around the terminal again.

"--or wherever you're going," he added in a hushed voice, with a conspiratorial wink. He seemed to be making fun of her, as though her life weren't in danger at all. She resisted the urge to throw hot coffee at him. "You went on and did your mission, and then...It doesn't matter. Eventually, you met me, you lucky girl." He smiled. "I'm from the future, too, of course."

"You're from fifty years in the future?" Raven wanted to think he was crazy.

"In all factuality, I was born in the twenty-fifth century, in the Atlantic Federation."

"The twenty-fifth century?" Raven mentally added a check to the "possibly crazy" column.

"Correct, but let's not get lost down that path," he said. "The reason you and I will eventually meet--the original basis for our friendship, you could say--is that we are the same kind of people. Nomads. Time nomads."

Raven stared, waiting for him to continue, but he didn't. "And...what? I'm supposed to know what that means?"

"You always say it would have been nice if someone had explained it in advance. When you have to figure it out for yourself, it's...confusing, scary, surreal, a living nightmare that won't end, all of that."

She looked up and down the terminal again. It was possible this man was here to distract and confuse her until the real attackers arrived. If so, he was succeeding--she felt very confused.

"A nomad," he continued. "Listen now, what follows is a familiar example. If you travel back in time and kill your own grandfather when he is only a child, what happens?"

"I recognize that. Is it a riddle?" Raven considered it, thinking that the boy had an odd way of speaking. "If you do that, you're never born."

"And so?"

"So if you're never born, then you can't travel back in time. If you can't travel back in time, then you can't kill your grandfather. But that means you
do
get born, and so you
do
travel through time, but then you stop yourself from being born...it's an endless loop, right? It's not possible. It creates a..." She struggled to remember the precise word, but her brain wasn't working properly.

"A paradox," he said. "Which, some have feared, would unravel space and time, destroying the universe. It's not simply limited to bizarre cases of grandparent-related homicide. If you travel back in time to change a certain event in history, and you succeed, then what happens next? You return home?"

"Why wouldn't you?"

"Because if you succeed, you
can't
go home again." He leaned forward, his dark gray eyes burning into her in a way that made her uncomfortable. "Because of this, now listen....If you go back for a specific purpose, and you achieve it, then you never had a reason to go back in time. Right?"

"Slower," Raven said. "I'm tired."

"Let's say your goal is to save somebody, or assassinate somebody, twenty years in the past. Now, in the new course of history you've spawned, that person was already saved, or assassinated, twenty years ago. Why would you get into a time machine for the purpose of doing it yourself? It's already been done. There's no reason for you to change history. No motive for your trip through time."

She thought about it, though she wasn't sure whether she believed anything he said, especially the part where he claimed to be from Atlantis in the deep future. She admitted to herself that having this far-out conversation with this odd boy, who was actually a little bit attractive under the grimy exterior and the strange eyes, was just possibly better than sitting alone all night.

"Okay, let's pretend this isn't completely crazy," Raven said. "So, since history has already gone the way you wanted, you don't go back in time to change it. You don't have a reason to travel through time."

"But if you don't go back in time, then you don't accomplish your mission, so everything goes back to the original history," he said. "In which you
do
go back in time, and then...it's a paradox. It's like going back to kill your own grandfather, but it doesn't have to be that extreme. If you accomplish your purpose,
any
purpose, you create a new future in which you never go back in time at all, at least not on that particular mission."

"So what happens then? The universe blows up?" Raven asked.

"The universe is slightly smarter than that. Instead of allowing the paradox to spread, unraveling all of space and time in a supreme Armageddon sort of catastrophe, the universe treats you like an infection. It isolates you. You become an abscess on the flesh of space-time. That's what I am, and that's what you're going to become. A nomad. Rootless, wandering back and forth in time. It's a very
Slaughterhouse-Five
kind of existence, cut off from the natural flow of time."

"How am I isolated?" she asked. "What does it mean when you're cut off?"

"It goes this way: you travel back in time, you change history. You spawn a new timeline in which you never travel back on that mission, and maybe your entire life is different. The universe replaces you, the way your skin regrows and knits together under a scab. Meanwhile,
you're
the scab. You fall off."

"It replaces you with what?" Raven asked.

"Another you. A probable self, we call it, who lives this alternate version of your life, the version in which you never go back in time for this particular mission. Maybe that version of you never travels in time at all. Maybe, because of the changes you've made in the past, he's living an entirely different life altogether.
He's
the one who gets to enjoy the benefits of what you've done." A look of anger flashed across his face. "
You
have nowhere to go.
You
don't belong anywhere in space and time. You can't go home, unless you want to kill that other version of yourself, bury the body, and step into his shoes. But that seems..."

"Extreme?" Raven asked.

"Unlucky, at least." He shook his head. "That's why we're nomads. We are the ones who've traveled back to change the past, only to find there's nowhere for us to return. The universe cuts you loose, patches itself with another, less troublesome version of you, and time goes on..." He pitched his empty coffee cup into a barrel-sized rubber wastebasket lined with a black bag. "That's what the universe will do with you, if you carry out your mission."