Authors: JL Bryan
"Are you saying I shouldn't carry out this 'mission'?" Raven glanced at the wastebasket, full of plates, cups, and plastic dinnerware, feeling disoriented in a world where people threw away so many things with so little thought.
"Oh, no, wait, do what you want, that's your choice." He pulled back from the table, raising his hands with his palms out, as though he didn't want any responsibility to splash onto him. "Being a nomad has high points, too. You can see the sights, the past, the future...and we always know when history changes."
"Does it change very often?" Raven gave him a little smirk.
"All the time. You'll be walking down a city street and the entire place shifts--the city becomes a ruin, or grows twice as large. There might be a different language on the signs around you. The level of technology might advance or regress--horses to monorails and back again. The entire world might change, but few people notice, because their lives and memories change with it. Anybody who
does
notice seems crazy to everyone else. Our memories don't change, Raven. It's a benefit of being a nomad, if you choose to consider it a benefit."
"I'm not a nomad yet, though," Raven said. "Only if I complete this 'mission' you keep talking about, right?"
"That's true. You aren't one yet."
"So why are you here? What do you want from me?" she asked.
"I'm here as a favor to you. I'm talking to you as a friend."
"You're not my friend. I don't even know your name."
"Eliad," he said.
"Seriously?"
"That's just what you asked the first time we met," he said. "And I'll tell you again: it's a very common twenty-fifth-century Atlantean name. You usually call me 'Eli.' Or sometimes 'Lad' or 'Laddie' when you want to annoy me...I wish I hadn't mentioned that."
"So why are you here, Laddie? To warn me about becoming a time nomad?"
"No, forget I said anything about that. As far as your decision-making goes, just drop that information for now."
"I know how to make my own decisions."
"It will be your funeral..."
"What?"
"Possibly." He shrugged. "Some sort of gunmen from the future are hunting you, aren't they? So your life is currently in great danger."
"Have you seen them?" Raven sat up.
"No, relax, I'm just remembering what you've told me. You must be careful. We know you lived through this mission the first time around, because you and I met later. Now that I've intervened and changed things, anything's possible. They might kill you this time around because I'm talking to you right now. There's no way of knowing how things will change because of my presence."
"Well, thanks so much for that," Raven said.
"It's just a warning. Here's the real message--from you. From a future version of you, anyway. A probable future version of you, I should say, who may or may not come into existence now that I've intervened with the original--"
"Get to the point!"
"We have arrived there. Here's the message..." He leaned his face close to hers, so that his eyes filled her vision. He spoke slowly and carefully, as though reciting something he'd memorized. "History is the collision of countless events. You can't rewrite a story that complex with a magic bullet. You can change the world with time travel, but you can't control the results. You might make things better, but you're far more likely to open the gates of Hell."
He stood and stretched.
"Is that it? What does that mean?" Raven stood with him.
"It means, my pretty little bird, that your current mission won't accomplish what you think it will. You have to change course."
"Change course how?"
"You didn't fill me in on the details. I'm just delivering a message from you to you. You figure it out. I'm just the messenger, don't shoot me."
"If it's from my future self, why didn't I deliver it myself?"
"Interfering with your own past can be extremely risky. We want to intervene as little as possible. You have to be precise and surgical with these things. I've already put your life in danger just by altering events in any way. There's no guarantee you'll live this time. So promise me you'll be safe, right?" He leaned closer to her, and she tensed, ready to strike back. "Do you promise?"
"Sure," she whispered, wondering why his face was suddenly so close to hers.
She was prepared for a knife or a gun, so when he kissed her, her brain shorted out for half a second. She closed her eyes, letting his lips linger on hers for a long moment before she fully realized what was happening.
She snarled and threw a punch at his jaw, but her arm seemed to pass right through him. She opened her eyes.
He was gone. The terminal lay wide open and brightly lit in either direction, with only a thin, scattered crowd, but he wasn't anywhere among them.
She turned a quick circle, searching, but he'd vanished entirely, leaving her with the strange feeling that she'd just been kissed by a ghost.
Chapter Seven
The two-hour bus ride to New Haven departed early in the morning. Along the way, Raven passed time by using her sunglasses to learn about the city before she arrived. The glasses responded to both voice and hand gestures, and they connected to the 2013 version of the Internet to find whatever data she needed.
Raven learned the name "New Haven" sounded like a cult compound for a reason. It had been founded in 1638 by a breakaway sect of Puritans, who were of the opinion that other Puritans just weren't strict enough. It was one of the oldest American cities, best known as the site of Yale University.
She felt anxious as the bus arrived in New Haven. She was closing in on her target, an eighteen-year-old Yale student named Logan Carraway who was destined to become dictator of the nation.
At the New Haven bus terminal, she stepped off the bus and took a moment to stretch her legs and look around. The day was sunny and clear, and the salt-tanged air smelled fresh and clean after two hours on a bus.
Raven locked herself inside a bus station bathroom stall and checked the three-dimensional grid map of New Haven. In the narrow stall, the projection was so tiny she could barely read the text.
The red dot marking the target's NEXT KNOWN LOCATION was time-stamped thirty minutes from the present moment at a coffee shop called Willoughby's, located in an art department building on campus.
Raven walked to the university, wearing her dark glasses and keeping her hand near the pistol under her jacket. Though the city looked tranquil, she felt she was deep inside enemy territory.
She crossed a sprawling, grassy green lined with trees, walking on paved paths past fountains and antique churches with towering steeples. Ahead of her loomed the massive colleges of Yale, each one like a medieval fortress, imposing structures of brick and dark sandstone.
The entire scene was unreal to her, like an idyllic dream, a world that only existed in old movies. There were no armed men or armored vehicles patrolling the streets. Birds sang in the tall trees around her. She felt deep in her bones how much she did not belong in this world.
She walked in the shadows of dark Gothic spires and massive brick fortresses. The place struck her as a kind of fantasy land, a pleasure park for a crazed trillionaire, full of castles pretending to be centuries old.
Raven reached the place where she would find the target--a glass-walled coffee shop on the ground level of a tall, blocky art department building, which did not fit the overall medieval look of the school campus.
She bought a cup of organic Costa Rican coffee and took an empty table at the back with a broad view of the shop.
The map's timestamps must have been pulled from old data, she reasoned, like phone and bank records. Soon, the monster would be here, using his phone or paying with a credit card. Her anticipation caused the minutes to pass slowly.
"Search Logan Carraway," Raven whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. She wondered what the Internet of 2013 might tell her about Carraway and his family. Her glasses returned a list of results. The text and images that seemed to float in the air in front of her, though they were projected inside her lenses.
The first names on the list was
LOGAN CARRAWAY (1995- ), Grandson of Senator Archibald Carraway (Indiana)
. She pointed her finger to select it.
More text, images, and blocks of video filled her vision. A transparent square floating near the center offered a Wikipedia article from 2013 about Archibald Carraway. He was born in 1941, currently serving his fifth term in the United States Senate, representing Indiana.
Raven skimmed to find Logan's name, but it was only mentioned in passing as one of Senator Carraway's grandchildren. There was no link for more information.
There was a link to another article about Logan's father, Martin Carraway. He had graduated from Yale in 1984 and taken a law degree at the University of Chicago three years later. He'd served two terms as governor of Indiana, then left public office to create a private company...
An icy chill shuddered through her. She swallowed and forced herself to read the sentence again:
After leaving office, Governor Carraway founded
Providence Security
, a private corporation providing security staff and related services to state and federal agencies. The Carraway family owns a majority of stock in the company.
Fearful memories flashed across her brain like chain lightning. First, the bikers who'd tried to kill her, with the golden Providence Security logo etched into their armor--an all-seeing eye inside a pyramid. Then she saw herself and her friend Kari firing at Providence Security troops from the windows of buildings already shattered by aerial bombs. In some of those memories, she was no older than eleven or twelve, firing machine pistols and lobbing thermal grenades at the company's sleek urban tanks and assault trucks.
Raven reached a shaking hand toward the blue
Providence Security
link, wondering what it would say about the company in 2013, but then she saw him.
A wave of students flooded the coffee shop, and she felt a jolt of sick recognition at the sight of his face. He hardly seemed to be the same person as the craggy old dictator, but the face had been burned into her mind all her life.
The eighteen-year-old Logan Carraway had an exuberantly healthy look, a tanned face with an easy smile, and electric green eyes that seemed to glow. He moved with a barely restrained vitality that made her think of a wolf in cage.
Logan tossed a rumpled dollar into the glass tip jar, and the pretty, dark-skinned barista behind the counter flashed him a smile and looked him over. He was already walking away, raising his paper cup in a mock toast as he approached an already overcrowded table. A few of the students there toasted him back.
A striking blond girl wearing a crisp white dress shirt and dark slacks stepped out to block his way, brushing Logan's arm as she spoke to him, but Raven couldn't make out what she was saying.
Logan leaned down and spoke a few words into the blond girl's ear, and she laughed, covering her mouth and blushing. She gave him a playful punch in the arm as he moved on to join his friends, then she whispered to a girl beside her, also blond and dressed in clothes similar to hers.
Raven watched Logan join the overcrowded table. The others seemed to lean towards him slightly as he sat, like plants bending toward the sun. Logan spoke rapidly, with sweeping hand gestures, immediately dominating the conversation.
"Excuse me, but don't you think you're hogging the resources here?" a voice asked. Startled, Raven looked up to see the snub-nosed blond girl who'd tried to distract Logan. She stood over Raven's table with a hint of disgust in her baby blue eyes. Her friend next to her held both their coffees.
"Specifically, this table," the blond girl continued. "It has four chairs, but you're sitting alone, and that leaves
us
with nowhere to sit."
Raven looked around at the packed coffee shop. Though the shop had been all but empty a few minutes earlier, the newly arrived crowd of students had taken every table.
"You want to sit with me?" Raven asked.
The girl snorted, just slightly so it was barely audible. Her friend's lip curled into a sneer as she looked over Raven's scaly black jacket and discount-store blouse. The two girls had matching hair, as though they'd gone through identical treatments to make them soft, silky, and golden blond. Their clothes were well-made and new, and they probably took Raven for some kind of homeless street thug...which she was.
"I'm afraid not," the blond girl said. "We have more friends coming, so you'll need to go find some one-person-appropriate seating for yourself. That's fair, don't you agree?" The girl smiled, but not in a particularly friendly manner
"I was finished, anyway." Raven got up. She didn't want to fight over something as stupid as a place to sit, and she certainly didn't want to draw attention to herself.
"How fortunate for all of us." The girl blinked her eyes impatiently until Raven left the table. As the two girls sat in her place, they whispered to each other, glanced at Raven's combat boots, and snickered.
"'Oh, I need all four chairs to myself.' That's exactly what's wrong with Americans today," the blue-eyed girl told her friend. "So greedy. Everything for me, nothing for anybody else..."
Raven hurried out, feeling as though every person in the shop were staring at her. Burning heat flushed her cheeks. She felt she'd been called out as someone who didn't belong.
On the sidewalk, she took a deep breath of air. Maybe she was wrong about Logan, and she'd actually come back through time to kill the snub-nosed blue-eyed girl instead. At the moment, she wouldn't mind that at all.
Logan's next known location on her map was the sidewalk where she stood, in front of the art building, but it was more than an hour away. He was probably in a class during the intervening time.
Her stomach rumbled. She walked to the next block and ate a cheap but delicious bowl of rice noodles with beef. The food was shockingly good--she'd been expecting only basic sustenance, not a perfectly seasoned dish.