Reversion (The Narrows of Time Series Book 3) (29 page)

“Quite possibly,” Fuji said.

Lucas appreciated the monk’s semivote of confidence. “The question is, how far?”

Before Fuji or Kleezebee could answer, the entire lab rumbled around him and Lucas fell to the ground. The glasses went flying from his face, bouncing to the corner.

Thirty seconds later, the lab door flew open and Masago ran in. Griffith and local Kleezebee were right behind her.

Masago looked to the ceiling. “Earthquake?”

Lucas shook his head. “That was no Earthquake.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because the same thing happened the first time around, only it wasn’t supposed to start until later tonight. Though, I don’t remember it being so powerful.”

“Explain,” Kleezebee demanded.

“Across the hall, the other me and Drew just ran the experiment and sent the E-121 power module across dimensions and into the future. And, if events hold true, they did so at full power. But that would also mean NASA ran their version of the same test at the same time, and did so at a time different than before . . . so, then, the bleed-back ripples must have changed the timing of both, making sure they both were initiated at the same moment, just as before. What are the odds of that?”

Kleezebee’s mouth fell open, but he didn’t respond.

“Is that bad?” Masago asked.

“Oh yeah, you could say that,” Lucas answered, turning his gaze to the professor. “The Krellians will detect the signal. Then it begins.”

“What begins?” Griffith asked.

“The invasion. The end of all we know. Powerful energy domes from another dimension will soon appear across the planet, destroying everything in their path. Then the Krellian Sentinels will come through a dimensional rift, kidnap my brother, and kill everyone who’s still alive.”

“Oh my God! Why didn’t you tell me?” Masago asked.

“I was hoping to stop all of this from happening. Again.”

“Time finds a way,” Griffith said.

Lucas was shocked that Griffith used the same words as Kleezebee did in the future. Maybe Griffith is the person who taught future Kleezebee the phrase. “Exactly, Grif. Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

Masago stood motionless with her eyes transfixed on Lucas.

“Now I understand,” Kleezebee said in a slow, solemn voice while staring at the floor with a glazed look in his eyes.

“There has to be something we can do,” Masago said.

Kleezebee hesitated, then said, “We need to send Lucas further back in time to attempt another correction.”

Lucas walked to the corner and picked up the glasses. He put them on. “Yes. That’s what I was just discussing with the other you. The you from the future.”

Before Lucas could continue, his vision blurred and images distorted. Objects around him began to elongate, with their edges fading in and out like a cloud was floating past. He staggered and Masago grabbed him by the arm, keeping him from hitting the deck.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Lucas saw a black, vertical distortion line appear in the corner of the lab. It began to move left. He pulled the glasses off, but the anomaly was still there and moving along the same path. “What the hell is that?”

Griffith and Kleezebee turned in a flash, staring at the corner, then looked at each other.

“Do you see anything?” Kleezebee asked Griffith.

“No. Just the walls. You?”

Kleezebee shook his head.

The distortion passed through his friends, sending out a wave of pressure that smacked Lucas in the face. When it made contact, Lucas found that the glasses were back on his face even though he hadn’t put them there. He looked at his hand, wondering how the glasses had jumped from his fingers to his nose, but what he saw made him gasp. The middle finger on his right hand was missing above the second knuckle. “Holy shit!”

Masago grabbed his arm again, though Lucas thought she was already holding onto it from before.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“My finger!”

She looked down, but didn’t say anything.

“It’s missing!”

Masago tilted her head. “Yeah, I know.”

He didn’t understand. Why wasn’t she shocked like he was?

Another distortion wave crossed the lab, but this one moved slightly faster than the first. It passed over before Lucas could brace himself. The glasses were instantly back in his hand and Masago was now standing on the opposite side with her arms wrapped around his waist instead of his arm. Like bad continuity in a low-budget movie.

Lucas held his hand up and found that his finger was now intact. “What the fuck?” He opened and closed his hand to check the status of his finger. It felt normal.

A third wave of distortion rippled across the lab. Again, it was moving faster than the previous one. The glasses were back on his face and Masago was standing near Kleezebee, whose face was now without a beard—only a mustache. Lucas turned to look at Griffith, but the scientist wasn’t in the room. “Where’s Grif?”

“Grif who?” Kleezebee asked.

“Griffith, the man whose lab we’re in.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know anyone named Griffith,” Kleezebee said.

The distortions continued, each faster than the previous. Each causing more and more changes. Objects and people came and went, some of them moved or changed in some fashion.

Lucas waited for another ripple effect. Instead, a wave of dizziness roared in his head, making him stumble and drop to a knee. He shook his head and blinked, waiting for the speckles in his vision to clear. They did.

Griffith ran to him. “Are you okay? What’s wrong.”

“Did you feel that?” he asked, looking at Griffith and then at Kleezebee.

Kleezebee shook his head. “Feel what?” The professor’s beard and clothes had returned to normal.

“You look as white as a ghost,” Griffith said.

Lucas scanned the room but didn’t see Masago. He looked at the lab door and back at Griffith. “Where’s Masago?”

Kleezebee moved two steps closer, shooting Lucas a focused glare. “She should be still in the truck. Right where we left her.”

“In the truck?” Lucas answered, feeling a cold numbness swirl around his body.

“We agreed she should remain in the truck.”

“No, we didn’t. That’s not what happened. She was right here. Not two seconds ago.”

Kleezebee flared his eyebrows, but didn’t respond.

Another ripple raced across the lab. Lucas closed his eyes and waited for the pressure to engulf him. It did. A moment later, someone touched his arm. He opened his eyes and turned his head, finding Masago standing there like nothing had happened.

“You okay?” she asked.

Lucas wrapped her in a hug. “Not exactly, but I’m getting there.”

Another distortion passed, and Lucas found himself standing alone and outside on the grassy mall. The warmth of the afternoon sun washed over his face and caressed his skin. He looked around and took in the sights from the buzz on campus.

The science building sat off in the distance, while the Student Union rose up in front of him, untouched by the destruction he remembered the last time he stood in this very spot two years earlier. From the northeast, a trio of fast-moving fighter jets screamed over campus in formation, banking left to head south toward Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Their flightpath took them through a spread of strange-looking clouds, floating across the sky in an elongated washboard pattern. There was an empty section in the middle that formed the letter X.

Motion from his right caught his attention. He looked and saw his younger self pushing Drew in his wheelchair. Young Lucas was wearing a bright-yellow shirt, something older Lucas would never have worn, not even on a dare.

Older Lucas swung his eyes around and checked the stairs leading to the front of the Student Union. There were only seven students waiting in front of the theater entrance, not hundreds like before. He surveyed the crowd, but didn’t see Drew’s girlfriend Abby or her sexy new roommate, Jasmine.

“Not enough people waiting and not the right time,” he mumbled, searching his memory. “Plus the girls should be there and it happens at night. This isn’t it.”

Before he could draw another breath, he found out he was wrong when a brilliant flash of white light erupted from the area a few feet behind the theater line, then time slowed to frame-by-frame action. He watched everything around him creep forward one second at a time as the first Krellian incursion began on the steps of the Student Union.

“Oh, no. Not now!” he yelled, watching the colors in his vision begin to fade. He turned to yell at his younger self and Drew to get down and protect themselves, but a distortion wave passed over him before he could get the words out. A heartbeat later, he was back in the lab with Masago holding onto his elbow. Griffith and Kleezebee were standing where they were before, making him think everything had returned to normal. He waited for more ripples, but they never came.

“Did any of you see that?” he shouted.

Masago let go of him. “See what?”

“Distortion waves—changes to people and things—time slowing, then a flash,” Lucas said, grabbing his street clothes from the worktable. He stood motionless as his mind whirled, trying to unscramble what he’d just experienced. It was clear the others couldn’t see or feel the distortion waves, nor did anyone else notice the changes that the ripples brought with them. Since he wasn’t affected, but everyone else was, it meant he was immune to the ripple effects.

But why?

He put on the street clothes while he ran through several theories, realizing only one of them made sense: the Smart Skin Suit. It carried with it a residual charge after the connection with the glasses. The reserve power must have created some type of temporal shield, protecting him from the changes. It was the only theory he could muster, but it still didn’t explain the random flashes of change he’d witnessed. Was he seeing alternate versions of his own timeline, or was it some type of looking glass, allowing him to see twisted versions of the past and future? He wasn’t sure. Could be any, or all three.

It was also possible the distortions might have been the aftereffect of wormholes disconnecting from alternate universes—the very same universes where his copies had originated from. If so, they were showing him the results of various alterations as they were being made to their respective timeline. There was no way to know which of his suspicions was correct, if any, so he decided to let instinct guide him.

His gut was telling him that most of what he’d seen was Father Time changing channels, showing him snapshots of alternate realities being created and destroyed as the predestination paradox worked its way further and further back through time. Almost like it was narrowing down the timeline choices, trying to find the perfect set of events in the past in order to generate the final future.

Just then, a phrase flashed in his mind:
The Narrows of Time
.

But what about the last distortion event? The one that took him in front of the Student Union where his younger self was modeling an ugly yellow shirt. Why was it the last scene? That fact must be important. Otherwise, all of the craziness he’d just witnessed was simply random timeline static and meant nothing—a conclusion he couldn’t accept. No, it must be important. It had to be. He believed the last vision was shown to him because Father Time had finally made a decision. If he was right, then time had selected the future it wanted by choreographing the past—the past of this Earth. Then, by extension, none of what happened the first time around would hold true anymore.

Time finds a way.

That’s the phrase Griffith used. The same phrase future Kleezebee quipped frequently. Lucas was starting to understand its meaning—the order and magnitude of events aren’t set, but the future and its predetermined end still arrives as planned, regardless of what has or will happen in the meantime. In other words, you can’t change the end result, not if time had any say in it.

He turned to Masago, with eyes wide. Then he looked at the professor and Griffith, wondering if they’d follow him—no questions asked. He needed them to do just that. If his gut was correct, there wasn’t time for a debate.

“Everyone. Come with me. Now.”

Jesse Donnor bent forward, fumbling between the seats of his girlfriend’s Toyota Land Cruiser for his phone. He found it before the fourth ring and sat up, bumping his head into the low ceiling. He slid his butt lower in the seat to make room for his tall frame.

The caller ID said it was his girlfriend, Cheryl. He swiped the screen with his finger while controlling the steering wheel with his knee. He put the phone up to his ear.

“Ello?”

“Where are you?” she screeched.

“On Campbell and Sixth Street. I’m almost to work. What’s up?”

“I need you here. There’s an issue at work.”

“Is it that asshole, Blake?”

“No. No. No. Blake’s off today. It’s a regular.”

“Did he touch you? Pull it out? What?”

“It’s not that. I need you to handle someone. For one of the dancers who used to work here. Do you remember Stacy?”

A vision popped into Jesse’s mind, remembering the stunning bombshell that worked at the club a few years ago. “Wasn’t she the blonde with the fake tits who could sing? I sort of remember her.”

“Who are you kidding?”

“What?”

“You two flirted heavy every time you came to pick me up after my shift. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

“It was just friendly conversation, hun.”

“It was more than that. But that doesn’t matter now, she’s married.”

“To that scientist guy, right? Or was it the fat landscaper? I can never keep ’em straight.”

“Griffith, the scientist at the university. We went to their wedding, remember? He hired Alice Cooper to play at the reception.”

“Didn’t the hotel manager complain about the noise?”

“That’s the one.”

“Best reception ever, from what I remember of it.”

“Griffith had a friend who used to bring him to the club.”

“Oh, yeah—that guy. The sweaty lawyer with hands that never quit.”

“Larson.”

“What a slug.”

“He’s here now, and I need him dealt with.”