

Tarkentower

a Quantum Fantasy

DANIEL SCOTT WHITE

LONGSHOT PRESS

COPYRIGHT

Published by Longshot Press

Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Scott White

longshotpress.com

No part of this book may be reprinted

or reproduced in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without the written permission

of the publisher or the author.

ISBN 978-0-9830541-1-5

Smashwords Ebook Edition

"There's nothing more dangerous than

someone who wants to make the world

a better place."— Banksy

Compass

\- Part One -

Tomorrow

Underground

Future Earth

The City

\- Part Two -

Dead Man

Night Run

Outcast

The Ranger

\- Part Three -

Relocation

Across the Plains

The Attack

\- Part Four -

Into the Kingdom

Courts and Chaos

Beyond the Kingdom

Burning Time

Tarkentower

\- After -

Your Turn

About The Author

History

# Part One
#  Tomorrow

From a distance the bicycle shop looked empty. I shuffling up the sidewalk, watching to see if I was followed, and stopped at the window. There was a lot more dirt in my reflection than I expected to find. With the side of my fist I rubbed the window clean enough to peer inside at a dark interior, nobody around, bicycle frames covered in rust, signs of old age hanging on everything inside and out, including the windows and the doors. It looked like a good place to hide, but when I tried the front door, it was locked.

Thousands of leaves pushed by the wind hunched up in a pile against the bicycle shop. I sat down on the sidewalk and scooped up the leaves, crunchy and crinkled, and dumped them on my legs, then leaned back, dumping more on my torso, my head, everything but my eyes and nose, then buried my arms beside me. The dead leaves reflected the color of my skin. Nobody would see me here.

At this moment I hated the city more than anything. Before all this starting happening, before people disappeared and the city turned vacant, I thought wandering the streets a great way to spend my time. I was a street artist and proud of my work. It sure beat going to school. But hiding in the leaves, in the crumpled leaves, with the cold wind biting at my eyes, and not knowing if I was safe right now, it all brought home the realization that the world could be a desperate place.

Somehow, someone was still alive in the city and I was being hunted. I hadn't had time to stop and consider what I'd do next if they found me here, lying on my back with sticks and twigs and cold dark leaves piled up high over my shivering frame. I only hoped they wouldn't think to look in such an obvious place, in a pile of wind-blown leaves captured on the leeward side of a deserted building.

I sighed, wondering how I'd gotten here. This morning, I'd been here, standing outside this same bicycle shop, I was sure of it. The streets had been busy, people pushing, noises everywhere, pollution, cars, traffic lights, sirens, horns, it never stopped. I'd gone to school and been hassled by yet another teacher hellbent on slamming education down my throat. I wanted so much to be somewhere else, anywhere but in the classroom, and after putting my head down on my desk, I drifted off, waking up in an empty world.

More leaves collided in the afternoon wind as I looked up at the passing clouds. Something bit my leg. I rolled over on my knees and fished around in the leaves until I found a rock. Across the street, a whimpy-shaped kid barked at me, words I couldn't decipher. I shook my head, a buzzing in my ears. He waved me closer, challenging me to a fight. I got up and took a step.

He squinted as he bent down to pick up another rock. For a moment he had to take his eyes off me. He was soft and lumpy and I thought he'd bounce if I pushed him over. I almost rushed him while he was looking down. But I hesitated. He seemed harmless enough, in a disconnected sort of way, as if none of this could be real.

A forest had grown up within the city, branches butting the sides of the buildings, grass and weeds entwined together, breaking through the cracks in the pavement, the buildings themselves crumbling in the shadows. This wasn't my home, the city I had known inside and out, the place I had been born. Something had gone wrong. As I scanned the alleys and empty windows for another place to hide, I thought about a life I had left behind. A shiver passed through me with the touch of the wind.

The boy advanced, stepping out into the street between us. He was still saying something, but I had that buzzing in my ears. I took a few quick steps forward, yelling gibberish at him and flinging my arms around like a windmill. He disappeared around the corner.

I raced after him, crossing the street, but before I had a chance to tail him, a rock hit me in the shoulder. This time it came from a girl leaning against the side of a building less than half a block away. She looked good, sparkling in the sun. I couldn't take my eyes off her. She waved in a friendly way and I smiled. Then she tossed a rock in the air and caught it.

"I'm warning you," I yelled and backed away, my ears popping open as soon as I spoke.

"Come on, you freak," she said and laughed.

I took a quick leap into an open doorway, landing in the dark, then fumbled my way across a room, running into chairs and desks, until I came to a long wall. I felt my way along the wall and found a door and threw it open. Inside, the stale air pinched at my lungs as I tripped over more chairs, and then I smacked the bridge of my nose against a bookcase. I muffled a cry, holding my nose tight, tasting the blood trickling down my chin. With little time to spare, I found another doorway and ran through that. Light appeared out of nowhere and I jumped for an opening and tumbled out into the street.

They were like shadows I couldn't lose. What burned me even more was how they always seemed to know where I'd be next. Expecting them to come around the corner at any moment, I crawled behind a garbage bin to hide. I rolled myself into a ball, wrapping my arms around my knees. Hunger hit me full on and my legs burned for more oxygen. A second later I heard voices approaching.

"Where'd he go?" the boy asked.

"Don't know," the girl said.

"I think he's harmless."

"I'm pretty sure he's lost it."

She planted the sole of her foot squarely into a scrawny tree near where I was hiding, sending a shower of leaves down all around me. Knowing it was now or never, I grabbed a broken tree limb and rushed out into the middle of the street.

"Back off," I yelled, pointing the sharp end of the stick at them.

"Where'd you come from?" the boy asked, squinting. Anger flashed in his eyes as he looked around for a weapon.

In one fluid movement the girl took a step in my direction, positioning her fist behind her head, posing to strike like a viper. I jabbed back and forth between them, unsure what to do next. Mostly, it was the girl's catlike moves that intimidated me. The boy, his pudgy body wobbling as he moved, might sit on me, worst case scenario. I could handle that.

"Wait a minute," he said, looking sideways at her. "He understands us now. You go ahead and break his head open, if you want to. But what if he's an asset?"

"You got any skills?" she asked, taking a step closer.

I took a step back. "What kind of skills?"

"Take him to see Amelia," the boy said. "Let her talk to him. Then we'll know if he's salvageable or not."

"Who's Amelia?" I asked.

He pointed at his brain. "She can fix your head."

"Back off! I mean it," I yelled and made a quick stab at the girl.

"Hey, watch it," she said, swinging her foot in my direction, trying to connect with the stick.

"No, you watch it." I jabbed at her but she held her ground, batting my stick away with her open hand.

"Listen," she said, putting her arms down for a moment. "I bet you don't even know where you are. We've been following you for hours and you're just going in circles."

I tried to picture the layout of the city from the top, like a map in my mind, but it wasn't easy, not with the cluttered streets and the crumbling buildings. Something had gone wrong with my city. A fog moved in a covered the inner workings of my brain.

My legs disappeared out from under me and I saw the street rushing up to meet the side of my face. The boy ran over and bent down, putting a hand on my shoulder. I hugged myself and squeezed my eyes shut tight. Someone pulled the stick out of my hands.

"What happened?" I managed to breathe out as the pain subsided.

"Memory lapse."

"What?"

"Uh...you passed out," the boy said in a shaky voice.

"I'm just so hungry all the time."

He fished around inside his backpack and came up with an apple. I sat up and took it, chomping into it with fast mechanical bites. I tried eating the core as well, but it tasted bitter. Instead, I gave it to a line of ants flooding down the sidewalk. They swarmed all over the apple in seconds, and some tried to move it, but it was too heavy for them.

"Slow down," the boy said. "You eat too fast and you'll regret it."

He dug deeper inside his backpack and pulled out another apple. I made that one vanish just as fast. I was about to ask for a third when something moved inside my stomach. I threw the core down on the sidewalk and looked around for a place to bury my head. A piece of apple turned savage-brown popped out of my mouth and landed in the street.

"Trust me, Lewis. You don't wanna eat too fast in your condition."

"What!" I bellowed. "How do you know my name?"

They looked at me but nobody spoke.

I rolled over and attempted to run down the sidewalk on my knees, then gave up. Everything hurt too much.

"You fool," the girl yelled at the boy. "What're you doing?"

"Just leave him alone," the boy said.

She pushed him out into the street. As they argued together, I couldn't keep my eyes off her. Her hair was long and blonde and tied back in a leather barrette and her shirt had fallen down off one shoulder. There was something about the way she moved, as if she were dancing on water.

The boy was more of a basket case than anything. He was a sad combination of mismatched clothes and sloppy reflexes. His fighting moves were comical to watch.

"All you've done is confused him," the girl said, her fist almost in his face.

He strained, hands up in the air, leaning forward with all his weight, holding her back from pummel him. Then he let go, took a quick step to the side, and turned to me. She relaxed and gave him a chance to speak.

"I'm just going to level with you. Amelia sent us out here to find you. She said to bring you in if it looked like you could be an asset to the team."

"She said what?" I blurted out.

"You want to join us?" he asked.

"Who are you?" I demanded, looking back and forth between them.

"I'm Lucerne," the girl said. "Fat boy here is Deon." She grabbed him, wrapping her arm around his neck, and rubbed her knuckles into his head.

He pushed her away. "Stop that! You know how much I hate it. Why are you always doing that!"

"He looks like a real happy meal," I tossed out.

He took a swing at the air in my direction. "Why'd you go and say a thing like that? I'm on your side, remember?"

"I don't remember anything." I looked around, hoping to find another way to escape from this pair of circus clowns. This was going nowhere.

Down the street emptiness waited. For a moment I imagined people like ghosts passing through the city, oblivious to the leaves and the litter blowing past them. I wanted to climb in the broken window of a derelict car and speed away, but the fog-like faces of people no longer living held me frozen in place. I felt a sense of hopelessness blanket me, weighing me down, placing me immobile like a smudge on the map.

"What is it?" Lucerne asked.

The boy and girl were peering down the street, trying to see what I had seen, concerned etched on their faces.

"Is there somebody down there?" Deon asked. "Are they coming this way?"

"We'd better move out," Lucerne said. "We've got no exit strategy if we're attacked here."

"You got any more food?" I asked.

"Yeah. We've got tons," Deon said. "Just come with us."

I went with them, partly out of curiosity and partly lured on by the hope of finding more food. We walked past desolate buildings, housing forlorn birds perched high above, lines of cars waiting in anticipation at traffic lights that would never change, and doors to storefronts left open and nearly torn off their hinges. The city was a blank slate, a whole generation of memories wiped off the face of the planet.

We stopped at an alley and were confronted by a wild dog, its ears working, nose twitching, back legs ready to launch forward at the first sign of danger. The dog flinched when it saw us, then froze for a moment, before skipping away. I watched the animal disappear, wondering where it had gone. Somewhere, there had to be food around here.

Lucerne tapped me on the shoulder. "We need to keep moving. No time to rest now."

"Amelia really told you my name?"

"Nope," Deon said and laughed like a wild horse. "I saw it on your shirt."

I stretched my shirt downward and tried to read it backward, the letters inverted. Printed across my chest in a large font was the name LEWIS FULLER and below it the number 15.

"That's not me," I said weakly. "I don't know who that is."

Lucerne asked, "What can you remember?"

Still unsure about my past, I changed the subject. "So you just made up all that stuff about taking me to see someone?"

"No, that part was true," Deon said.

I didn't buy it. They knew a lot more about what was going on than I did. Until they started telling me the truth, something that made sense, I was in no hurry to follow them anywhere.

We passed by the dark entrance to a building and on impulse I slid into the doorway, fading into the shadows on the other side of the room. As I waited for them to leave, my eyes adjusted to the dark. I watched through the window as yet another comedy unfolded. They were fighting over something and their voices drifted my way.

"Where'd he go?" Deon asked.

"So much for that. Got any better ideas?"

"Yeah, why don't you go in there and get him."

He gave her a push. She staggered for a moment and regained her footing. She almost boxed him in the ears, but he ducked down, crouching on the street, leaving himself undefended. She only shook her head and pushed him over. He rolled away and stood up.

"I'm not going in there. You think I'm crazy?" she said.

"What set him off anyway? What'd I say?"

"He's paranoid now. You shouldn't have given him so many details. Makes them run every time."

"I just wanted to get him moving."

I stopped listening for a moment. Something in the room was moving. There was a slithering sound, like the wind blowing through a barely opened window late in the night, or maybe it was the sound of the train coming down the tracks when you're lost and hungry and wandering far from home. I stood immobile, hoping it would go away.

Something tapped the back of my leg and I felt a pin-prick followed by a searing sensation. I jerked my leg forward, stepping away from the dark, trying to get closer to the window by hopping forward on my one good leg. The room lit up and glowed a cold blue color. The air smelled putrid. I shivered, my temperature dropping. Without a second thought I leaped toward the door and rolled out onto the sidewalk, stopping on the street in a crumpled ball. Lucerne and Deon rushed over to help me up.

"What happened?" Lucerne asked. "Are you hurt?"

"Wait a minute. What's this?" Deon said, pointing at something behind me.

He grabbed my shoulders and twisted me around. I tried to lean over backward and see what he was pointing at. There was a dark smudge just below my knee on the back of my pants.

"What's that?" I asked.

They were both silent.

"Someone answer me!"

Whatever it was, it itched. I reached down to scratch my leg and Lucerne caught my hand midway there, pulling it back.

"Don't touch it," she warned.

As I watched in horror, my pants started to smolder. A strange chemical-blue flame broke out of nowhere, dancing madly as it sucked up fresh air. I screamed as the pain went through the roof of my head.

Deon pinned me up against the wall with all his weight. Lucerne grabbed a handful of mud from the gutter and pressed it hard against my leg, smothering the flame. After an eternity, the pain diminished and I could breath again. Deon eased up when I let my body go slack. Lucerne picked up a stick and wiped away the mud.

I twisted again to see what had happened. On the back of my pants was a patch of blue glass-like particles. Lucerne worked slowly, scrapping them aside, shifting her feet when some almost landed on her shoes. Her hand shook a little as she worked.

"Scissors," she demanded.

Deon reached inside his backpack and took something out. They were shiny and clean and somewhat small, like the scissors you'd use to trim your fingernails. Lucerne cut through one leg of my jeans, just below the knee, going all the way around. Then she made me sit down and she took off my shoes.

Everything around me was pulsing, passing in and out, flowing in time to a clock I'd never known how to wind.

She pulled my pant leg completely off as gently as a surgeon might have and laid it to the side and placed a fresh pile of mud on top of the charred spot. Then she cut off the other pant leg just like the first one and laid it down on the sidewalk next to its twin.

"Why'd you do that?" I asked.

"So your pants will match. Walking around with just one leg showing would look kind of stupid, don't you think?"

"You really care about how I look?" I asked, mesmerized by the sound of her voice.

She blinked slowly. I was unable to turn away. Her eyes were like giant oceans and I was drowning inside them.

"Listen, Lewis, you're just going to have to trust us," she said. "I know none of this makes any sense to you right now, but believe me, we've both been there before. Someone found us and took us in too. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here right now, helping you."

There was something about her touch, her hand on my leg.

"I'm all yours," I said.

She took my hand and helped me up. I leaned on her as we continued down the road, through the city and away from the emptiness.

As we walked, the hunger in the pit of my stomach returned. All I could think about was finding more food.

#  Underground

The sun sank lower in the sky with each step I took. The threatening shadows of broken things littering the streets were growing longer every minute. We were marching outward, away from the center of city, the girl and boy taking me somewhere. Somewhere, I hoped, where we'd find more food.

I'd had a mom and dad once. I was sure of it. I'd gone to school and had friends and everything, just like everyone else. Now they were all gone. The city was dead. I wanted to run up and down the streets calling their names, but no one lived here anymore. Whenever we crossed an intersection, each time another street block fell away, I felt more alone, more confused about everything. I couldn't remember who I was.

My stomach rumbled. As I followed Deon and Lucerne, my head spun like a leaf blown about in the wind. I giggled as I tried to grasp how whacked the world had become. Deon threw me a sideways glance and picked up the pace.

"Keep moving," he barked.

It was slow going, stepping over roots of tree and avoiding holes. A bicycle would have been faster here, but I was dizzy from hunger and knew I'd never get far on one. I only hoped they were really taking me somewhere where we'd find something to eat.

We passed a green road sign covered in dust, the words splayed across it barely visible in the fading sunlight.

"N-E-W C-A-R-G-O." I read the letters aloud. "What's that?"

"That's where we are," Deon said.

"This city was once called New Cargo," Lucerne explained. "But now I guess you could call it Old Cargo."

"Or maybe Dead Cargo," Deon said, letting out a laugh.

"Where's the cargo?" I asked.

Neither one answered me. I was pretty sure I'd said it, but no one responded. Panic flooded me as I wondered what was real. Anyone would have understood me under normal conditions, but this was far from that. I tried again, being sure to breathe out this time.

"Where is the cargo?"

Still nothing. I stopped in my tracks and crossed my arms, refusing to take another step until I knew more.

"Right now, you're cargo," Lucerne said, giving me an angry scowl. "And if you don't keep moving, we'll never make it to the base alive."

"Well, now I'm cargo. Before, I was an asset. Actually, I prefer being alone."

She grabbed Deon's elbow and pulled him off to the side of the road. "I need to talk to you in private. Right now!"

We'd left the city behind and were crossing into the countryside now. Here, the road was clear of trees. The land was barren, except for a few stubby bushes dotting the fields. The wind blew across the land in gusts and when it stopped there was no sound. The air felt chilly as the night settled in. I shivered while waiting for them to finish whispering together.

"He's got the IQ of a five-year-old," Lucerne said.

"Are we there yet?" I asked.

"Whatever happens," Deon said, turning to me, "when we get to the base, you have to remember who you are."

"I can't even remember yesterday. Tell me, who am I supposed to be?"

"You're Lewis Fuller and you're fifteen years old."

I shrugged.

Somewhere in the distance an animal howled, lonely and distraught.

"We shouldn't be out here so late," Lucerne said, her eyes skittering about as she took in the road up ahead.

I heard a noise and turned around back the way we'd come. Something near the dark outline of the city caught my eye. People were coming our way. They carried torches lit with fire, the flames dancing in the night air, and long pointed sticks that appeared anything but friendly.

"Is that a welcoming committee?" I asked, pointing with my chin.

"Run!" Deon shouted.

We ran. Deon took the lead and I followed. Lucerne came up behind, pushing me to keep up. I forgot all about my hunger for a moment and sprinted like a star shooting across the sky.

We came to a turnoff receding away from the road, two faint lines in the dirt, parallel tire tracks half-hidden below a tangle of dead grass. We darted out into the field along this two-lane path until we came to a shelter. It was old, derelict-looking, hardly noticeable from the road, and even if someone had seen it, hardly hinting at being worthy of investigation.

Deon pried the door open and I stuck my head inside. A surreal sky littered with stars appeared where the ceiling should have been. The floor was covered with crisscrossed boards, rotting timbers which had once been a part of the roof. A quarter-moon was climbing up the night sky, working its way through a maze of stars.

Deon shuffled across the room to the other side, treading deftly on a long flat piece of wood, careful not to fall through the gaps in the floor. I came next and Lucerne went last. In one corner of the room was a stairwell going down about a dozen steps into the earth. He grabbed a key from a recess in the wall and led us single file until we reached the bottom, where he unlocked a heavy wooden door. It opened a crack and out poured light.

The smell of food cooked to perfection hit me in waves and I pushed past him. A world of warmth surrounded me as I rushed inside. In the next room I found the meal I'd been seeking all day.

A weather-beaten shell of a man was standing in a kitchen holding a plate of steamed corn on the cob. He put the plate down on a table and said in a raspy voice, "Eat."

I needed no more invitation. Deon sat down next to me a moment later with a plate just as full as mine and Lucerne joined us soon after. While inhaling the stuff, I stole a look around.

The kitchen was a tribute to the age of cast iron. It contained an odd assortment of black hand-forged crude items which had seen better days. On one side stood a wood-burning stove, with a large kettle on top of it, and pots and pans hung everywhere from the walls and the ceiling.

The cook held a sharp knife and was cutting more corn and putting it in the kettle. He watched us eat in silence. On his shoulders were tattoos and his face looked like a road map for the moon. He stirred the kettle as the water boiled, steam rising in his face.

"Who were those people?" I asked between bites.

"Scavengers," Deon said. "They probably followed you just like we did after the last Star Burn."

"What's a Star Burn?"

"You can ask Amelia that," the man said, "as soon as you're finished."

"Thanks, King," Lucerne said, the first to finish, barely anything eaten off her plate. She got up and returned the plate to him. He pointed at the kettle with his knife, but she shook her head and mouthed, "No thanks."

King struggled to collect our plates and place them in the sink. Deon jumped up and gave him a helping hand. Then King barked at us in a rusty whisper, "Get in there. She's waiting."

We marched out of the kitchen and into an adjoining hallway where we stopped before an old door. Deon knocked lightly, his hand shaking. The door opened slowly, as if pushed by the wind, and a voice from inside called for us to enter. Mostly out of curiosity, I walked in first.

On one side of the room was a chalkboard covered with a thin layer of chalk dust. On the other stood an ancient desk buried under papers and pages of books torn out and separated into piles. In the middle of the room was a chair with just enough space to walk around it.

Amelia had wrinkles and gray hair. Her outfit might have been fashionable a couple hundred years ago. She was leaning back, sitting on the edge of the desk, her arms crossed. With a nod she indicated the chair in the middle of the room and I sat down. Deon and Lucerne took up positions somewhere behind me. I heard the bolt on the door lock after it shut. There was a strange smell of something burning and it made my head spin.

"What's your name?" Amelia asked.

"I'm Lewis Fuller and I'm fifteen years old," I said without conviction.

Her head snapped in my direction and she leaned over, squinting into my eyes. The sounds of Deon and Lucerne disappeared as the room lost focus. She paced around me a few times and I tried not to let my eyes fall out on the floor.

"Do you know where you are?" she asked from somewhere, but I couldn't see her. It almost sounded like she had climbed inside my brain.

"Yeah," I said, but flinched when she grabbed my shoulder. "No. Not really."

"Who are you?" she asked again.

"I don't know." I let my head fall back. I thought I saw a spider struggling to cross the ceiling and somehow knew it would never get anywhere.

She frowned and waited, and then returned to her desk where she picked up a notebook and wrote something down.

"Lewis sounds like a good name to me," she said. "We'll start with that. Do you know how old you are?"

"No."

"You might be sixteen, but we'll say fifteen, for the time being." She scribbled additional details in her notebook.

"Can he stay?" Deon asked. "I think he's harmless."

For a moment my mind went foggy and I lost all track of time. When the room came back into focus Lucerne was over at the desk looking at something in one of Amelia's notebooks. They were in the middle of a conversation and had been talking for I don't know how long. Deon was invisible again.

"Go now," Amelia finally said. "He's had enough for one day. Let him get some rest. Tomorrow we can start his re-education."

"One more thing," Deon said, stepping back into my line of vision. "He bumped into some of that blue stuff you warned us about. We tried to stop him, but he ran into a building. When he came out...well, take a look at the back of his leg and you'll see what I mean."

Amelia walked over and grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me out of the chair. She took a look at the burn on the back of my leg just below the knee. Then she went back to her desk and opened it and took out a pair of tweezers.

My head spun and suddenly she was on the other side of me. She pinched off a sliver of charcoal-colored residue stuck to my skin and dropped it in a thin glass jar. Then she stopped the jar with a cork and wrote something on a label and stuck it to the glass. She held the jar up to the light and squinted, if she were attempting to fathom what might be hiding deep inside the substance trapped inside there.

"Lights," she instructed.

Someone blew out the candles. Slowly, a pale glow appeared in the jar, a cold blue, just like light inside the building where I'd been stung. The glow faded and grew, faded, and then grew stronger, turning brighter, blossoming into a steady pulse. It was mesmerizing to watch. I felt my heart beating in time with the pulsing of the light coming from the jar.

"Lights," Amelia commanded and the candles were re-lit.

"Are you sure neither of you touched anything like this?"

They nodded in unison but said nothing.

She put the jar in her desk and shut the drawer. My head spun again and then she was looking deep into my eyes, but not looking at me, more like looking at something deep inside me, as if searching for something hidden there. For a second her face contorted into pure fear and then just as fast the panic was gone.

She returned to her desk and took out another jar and opened it and poured something foul smelling onto a piece of cloth. I shut my eyes as the odor hit me. She went to work on the back of my leg, rubbing it until my skin was nearly bleeding. I tried not to flinch. I inhaled deeply, the aroma in the room helping the pain go away.

When she finished, she looked around her desk for her notebook. She scribbled something on a blank page and then shut the book and put it away inside the desk and locked it.

"Strange. The stuff must be spreading," she mumbled.

"What stuff?" I asked.

She ignored me, commanding: "Go now."

# 

#  Future Earth

I was surrounded by little blue men on every side, thousands of them dotting the land for as far as I could see. They were round and pudgy looking and stayed as quiet as mice nibbling on hay. That is to say, they made little noises of contentment, and occasionally they nudged each other with their heads, and if they'd had tails, I'm sure they'd have been wagging them. When the wind blew they swayed from side to side and smiled at me as if they were all just a bit high. I tried to push some of them aside, which they didn't protest to, but then more of them stepped forward and blocked my way.

While I thought the whole scenario odd, and somewhere in the back of my mind wondered if it might be a dream, because I couldn't imagine something like this really happening, it got even stranger as the little blue men started changing colors. One minute they were all blue and the next they were green. Oddly enough, they would flip-flop, changing colors in unison, synchronized in waves, from blue to green to blue again. I wanted to convince myself this was just a dream, but something about this world seemed real, all too real, and I desperately looked for a way out.

I noticed a man walking across the landscape outside the realm of the little blue men, but he appeared too preoccupied with his own thoughts to notice the predicament I was in. He was tall and wore a white suit and his hair was white, and he even walked with a cane, which was also white. As he walked he appeared to be talking to himself, making gestures with his hands, totally unaware I was watching him. I waved at him frantically and he glanced over at me in surprise, to where I was stuck in the middle of the little blue men who were now little green men. They let him pass and eventually he came closer to where I stood.

By now, he had stopped using his cane to walk and was holding it high above his head as if he wanted to strike me with it. I started tossing little men out of the way as fast as I could, careless of whether they got hurt, but there were simply too many of them. Desperately, I picked them up two at a time and threw them in pairs, sending them spinning through the air like cards being tossed out of a deck at a magic show.

About the time the man came within striking distance I noticed my heart, which was hardly beating at all, although I was moving at close to the speed of light. And then my heart paused entirely, frozen in place out of fear of what might ensue. And I breathed what I thought was my last breath. The cane in the old man's hand came down hard and fast but it paused about a fraction of a centimeter away from my head, at which point the old man and the little people and the strange world disappeared completely.

I woke up naked and alone. I was in a cold vault below the ground, thinking maybe I'd died and would be stuck here forever. A lantern hanging on the wall revealed a dull-gray room sparsely decorated. There was a sink with a mirror above it, a table with no chair, and a low lying spring bed with a stiff mattress that I occupied. I pulled a thin wool blanket over my narrow frame and walked over to the mirror to take a look. In the reflection I saw the skeleton of a boy with a hungry expression stretched across his face, but who that boy was, I couldn't say.

I remembered something about sinking into a bathtub filled with hot water cascading out of a steaming kettle. The night before I'd scrubbed my skin with soap and a stone until it shone crimson red. My old clothes, full of holes and dirty, had been thrown into the fire that warmed the water for my bath. Even now, I smelled the faint fragrance of fallen leaves scenting my skin.

"Anybody got any clothes?" I called down the hallway after I'd pushed the door open and stuck my head outside my room.

Someone stirred in one of the rooms nearby. A door opened and an old woman stepped out, needle and thread and a pair of pants in her hands. I remembered her from somewhere. Maybe she had once been a teacher of mine. She looked older than before, though, much older than she should have been, as if she hadn't slept all night. She walked with a slow dance-like movement, carefully putting each foot down in front of her, graceful, yet exhausting to watch. I could have gone to her, grabbed the pants and returned to my room by the time she reached me, except that I wasn't wearing anything.

"Could I have a shirt too?" I asked and put the pants on in front of her as if she were my mother.

She checked the size and smiled a little when I showed her the pants fit. Then she went back to her room and closed the door without saying a word.

Down the hallway echoed the sounds of clinking pans. I heard a match being lit and then smelled wood-smoke drifting my way. Someone in the kitchen was humming a tune, his double-barreled lungs resonating deeply like an old dog howling softly in its sleep. The cook stuck his head around the corner and nodded good morning to me, but still half-dressed, I returned to my room and climbed back in bed.

I closed my eyes slowly and the world disappeared as my thoughts twirled away in a river of gray. There wasn't much I could remember about yesterday, except eating apples and running from someone. It didn't make any sense when I tried to put the pieces together, so I gave up on trying to figure out what was happening.

I dozed for a while and then was rudely awakened by a fat kid who was stabbing his fingers into my shoulder right where it hurts the most.

"Hey!" I yelled and pushed him back.

"There-there-there's a ranger outside," he stammered. "Everybody needs to hit the deck."

"Who?" I blurted out. "What?"

"Remember me? I'm Deon. Just follow the smell of food," he said, this time firing the words at me in rapid succession. He threw a shirt at me and ran out.

A girl stopped by the door to my room and looked at me as if she wanted something. I couldn't help but notice her thin attire and long legs. A moment later she disappeared from view without saying a word. I got up and put on the shirt and went out after her.

In the hallway I followed the inviting aroma of peppered eggs. I ran my finger along the wall as I walked towards the kitchen, my eyes half-shut, letting my nose show me the way.

I was about to put a spoonful of eggs in my mouth when someone grabbed me from behind. I was marched out of the kitchen and into the next room. The woman who'd fixed my clothes, the girl with the nice legs and the boy who'd tried to break my shoulder were already there, facing the door. The cook moved into place, next to the others, just as the door swung open. They saluted, but I did nothing.

A man wearing a dark uniform stood in the doorway. The first thing I noticed was the row of stripes on his shoulder. He also wore black boots and shiny sunglasses and he kept them on although the room was not well lit. He was muscular and thin and exerted an air of authority as he swaggered into the room.

He paced up and down our shabby line without looking directly at any of us. I licked some egg off one of my fingers and wiped my hands on the back of my new pants. He stopped in front of me, facing to my right, and paused there for an eternity. My stomach rumbled and I did a little dance like I desperately needed to go pee.

"Where's the bathroom?" I asked when I couldn't hold it any longer.

Deon giggled and the girl kicked him with the side of her foot. He snapped back to attention, but already something had changed in the air. It didn't feel as stifling in the room anymore.

The man inspecting us cracked a lopsided smile and glanced at me. "Do I smell breakfast?"

With the ice broken, King and Amelia fell out of line, both speaking to the ranger at the same time, never giving him a chance to respond. It sounded like they were trying to out-maneuver each other as they rattled off a list of complaints about the state of the base in this region. The ranger only nodded, showing little concern either way for the points they were making.

The girl tried to appear soldier-like and Deon shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I wandered back through the kitchen and found the bathroom down the hall, past my bedroom. When I was done, I returned to the kitchen, listening to the others talk in the other room as I ate.

"I'll say it again, we've only the four of us at this outpost, counting myself, Amelia, Lucerne and Deon, and we have to cover the entire New Cargo region," King was explaining. "Then there's this new kid to deal with. According to Amelia, he's in serious need of a heavy dose of re-education. That alone will delay us from making any real progress at mapping out this area and determining the level of sustainability here for a long time."

"There's also this evidence of the blue crystal spreading," Amelia pointed out. "The kid came in with traces of it on his leg last night. I'm surprised it hasn't eaten through his immune system by now and stopped his heart flat."

"He sounds like he's a little different from the rest," the ranger said. "By the way, where is he?"

Eggs were disappearing into my mouth as fast as I could manage. I jumped a little when he put his hands on my shoulders. The other had followed him into the kitchen and they sat down around the table.

"Slow down a bit. You're eating like you've got a third stomach." The ranger's eyes widened as he watched me stuff myself to the point of exploding.

King placed dishes around the table and then he forced me away from the stove and ushered me over to a chair. I kept my eyes pinned on the food as he dished out more of the best breakfast I'd ever tasted.

"What's your name?" the ranger asked, right after I'd shoved a spoon in my mouth.

"What's my name?" I mumbled in the direction of the fat kid.

"Lewis," he said and rolled his eyes. "You're Lewis Fuller and you're fifteen years old."

"It's great to meet you, Lewis," the ranger said. "I'm a ranger, by the way. I roam from base to base and check in on people. Do you have any idea what day it is?"

"Nope," I said. "Can I get some more?"

I handed my bowl to King who filled it up and returned it in one fluid movement.

"Well then, what can you remember about yesterday?" the ranger asked.

"Apples," I said.

"Apples?" he asked, squinting at me.

"Yeah, I ate apples."

Deon smirked. He was in a jovial mood today. Lucerne, on the other hand, remained quiet in front of the ranger, her eyes studying every move he made.

"Go on," Amelia said. "The sooner he knows, the better."

The ranger continued with the questions. "What about the day before yesterday? What do you remember about that?"

I thought for a moment. There was no day before yesterday anywhere in my memory. But that hardly mattered. I smelled the aroma of the eggs and took another bite.

"Do you remember anything about the past?" Amelia asked.

"Chocolate cake," I said, making it up.

"I see. And where did you get this chocolate cake from?" the ranger inquired.

"My mom," I lied.

My bowl was empty again. I glanced around the table and was about to accuse Deon of stealing when I noticed everyone's faces. Nobody had taken a single bite.

They all knew a lot more about what was going on than I did and that left me in the dark. My head was going fuzzy again and there was nothing I could do about it. Slowly, bits and pieces of past events were creeping into my mind and I didn't care much for what I was remembering.

"Where's your mom?" the ranger asked, his voice a distant whisper now.

"My mom? She's at home," I shouted. "Why do you ask so many stupid questions?"

The room had disappeared in places. Faces faded in and out. Slowly I put my spoon down on the table as if it might fall on the floor if I wasn't careful with it. I adjusted it to line up correctly with my bowl. It was important that I got it right. Everyone was waiting for me to speak, but I was afraid to look up at them.

"You know what?" I finally said, smashing my fist down on the table so hard that the bowl jumped and landed on the spoon. "I really don't know where I am right now, but I can tell you one thing. After I get enough to eat, I'm leaving."

I started humming a tune I'd heard somewhere a long time ago. I rocked from side to side in my seat as if I were a bird floating in time with the waves in the ocean. The room spun and bobbed, but I kept going, changing everything around me in my mind, until I thought I could feel the waves sloshing up against my feathers. I moved my feet under my chair in an effort to paddle myself back into the direction of the oncoming water so I wouldn't roll over. I smelled fresh sea-salt in the air and I thought I sensed movement below, maybe a fish passing by.

"One more question," the ranger said, a voice muffle and obscure, floating across the water. "Do you know how old you are?"

"I don't know!" I screamed, picking up my bowl and throwing it at a fish swimming next to his head.

He didn't move a muscle.

"You're probably not going to believe this," Deon said, "but you're over a hundred years old."

The room suddenly stopped spinning. The ocean disappeared and I lost all my feathers. I was back in the kitchen once more, not a drop of water on me. I looked at Deon and Lucerne. Then I looked at both King and Amelia. Nobody was laughing. Lucerne even looked a little sad. I held my breath. I held my breath and held my breath and held my breath. I couldn't turn myself into a bird again.

"What-what-what?" I said, letting it all out in a rush.

"Back there, in the old world, you were just a kid. You were probably about fifteen years old. But here, you're a hundred plus fifteen, or more," Amelia explained, but it made little difference. I had no idea what she was talking about.

"So what happened? If I'm so old, why don't I look like it? If I'm fifteen plus a hundred, or whatever, then I should be dead by now. We all should be a bunch of ghosts."

"You see," she went on, unraveling the story, "a long time ago, someone, we don't exactly know who, although we have a good idea who it was, this someone thought the earth was getting too crowded. And all those people were making the world a bad place, eating too much, polluting too much, killing each other, and so on. You understand? Picture a million ants trying to cover just one apple core."

"This someone," the ranger continued, picking up the story, "his name was Tarkentower, we think. He was really smart, smarter than all of us in this room put together. One day he thought the world would be a better place if there weren't so many people in it. So he made this giant machine and then he flipped it on and when he threw that switch the whole world got stuck in a loop, forcing everyone to live out the same day over and over again."

"But when he did this he created a future without any people," Lucerne said. "You know, time can't just stop like that."

I nodded and tried to appear wise beyond my years, as if I understood all the inner workings of time and the makeup of the universe. Nobody bought it.

"Inside this machine he placed a computer," Deon said, "with a program which randomly picks out candidates to move forward in time. When that happens, and we don't exactly know when it will happen, but when it does happen, the sky suddenly looks like a million black and white dots swimming around together, you know, like when you leave the TV on late at night and there's no station. That's when we have what we call a Star Burn, for lack of a better term, because we don't really know much about it."

"And when this Star Burn happens," the ranger explained, taking his turn at telling the story again, "someone is plucked from inside the loop and pushed forward to the next day in time. They get to live like we do right now. We live in the future. For people like us, the earth isn't so crowded any more. Maybe it only feels like a short time since you got here but this has been going on for over a hundred years now and there's nothing any of us can do about it."

"A few days ago," King rasped out, "you were stuck in the past and you were fifteen years old. Now, it's a hundred years later. The sooner you get your head around it, the better off you'll be."

"If that's true," I said after a while, trying to fathom what they were saying but not really getting it, "why can't I remember any of this?"

"We think you have mental problems," Deon said with a smile and kicked me under the table.

"Actually," Amelia said, looking closely at me to see if I was following along, "Tarkentower, as the legend calls him, although he was really smart, he couldn't foresee everything. Imagine being able to build a door in time so big that the whole world could fit through it, going around and around, revolving every day but never stopping. Who could foresee the outcome of an experiment like that? And one thing he didn't predict was that when people go through the same routine all the time, they stop being able to remember things. Without using our brains to solve problems, we lose the ability to think clearly. It's just like when you watch the same show on TV a hundred times. You get lured into a mindless state of consciousness."

"People who come through the Star Burn are always a little slow at first, so don't worry if everyone thinks you're weak in the head," Lucerne said with a flat smile.

"Everyday," Amelia went on, "we will need to re-educate you, teaching you just about everything you've already learned before. Mostly, though, we just have to wake up your old memories. It's been such a long time since you've actually had to think about anything that your brain's gotten really clouded upstairs."

She smiled faintly and I gave her a look of understanding. I liked the way she made everything sound so simple. What they were telling me was starting to make sense, in a fuzzy sort of way.

"OK, whatever," I said. "Maybe you all know a lot more about this stuff than I do. But that still doesn't explain why I'm so hungry all the time."

With that said, I stood up to fetch some more eggs, but because my bowl was on the other side of the room I ate with my finger right out of the frying pan in the middle of the table.

"We think it might be the experience of tasting something new for the first time in a long time," the ranger said. "You've been eating the same thing over and over for the past one hundred years."

Amelia nodded and added, "Or possibly it's a way of blocking out the past and focusing on what's right in front of you."

"The feeling like you need to eat everything in sight will soon pass," King said. "Until then, I've got plenty of things in stock for you to sample. But you'll have to learn how to cook as a part of your training. Everyone here has to fend for themselves, since we run a tight little crew in this region."

He threw a look at the ranger as he said this. The ranger nodded in response.

"Cooking would be a good place to start," Amelia agreed.

"But remember what happened to Deon," Lucerne objected. "When he came through six months ago, he wasn't so pudgy. After King handed him the key to the stock room he really got flabby."

"You've only been here six months?" I asked him.

"Yeah, but I'll never be as hard-core about this military life as she is," he said, bouncing a billion sound waves off the top of my head and into her ear. "Besides, I lost a little weight yesterday while we were chasing you. I knew we'd catch you eventually, but you put up a good fight."

"Do I need to separate you two?" the ranger asked, pointing his finger back and forth between them. "I heard there's a room available over at the next outpost. Who wants a transfer?"

"I can handle it, as long as he can," Lucerne blurted out.

"It's time to get to work," Amelia interrupted. "We have a number of important issues that need to be addressed."

She led the ranger around the base, indicating things that were being neglected. A leaky pipe. The diminishing medical supplies. And so on. The ranger listened closely, nodding his head and taking notes and occasionally asking questions. I followed them, attempting to ignore the lure of more food back in the kitchen for as long as I could. Deon and Lucerne tagged along.

The base a one time had been the cellar of a large church. We passed room after room, some of which had been used as burial places for saints, and some for cells where monks had lived in isolation, pondering the divine nature of the universe. The strange smell of deteriorating cloth and the fragrance of burned incense lingered behind as a reminder of the past. In some places the walls and the ceiling were charred black where torches had been left burning.

It was eerie to walk through this vast network hidden under the ground but I stayed close to Lucerne as she seemed to know the most about where we were going. Occasionally we came across a section of the outpost where a wall had fallen down, blocking any progress in that direction. When I listened closely, I thought I could hear whispering voices coming from behind the rubble. Or maybe it was just the sound of water running on into oblivion.

I wanted to see everything, yet my stomach rumbled for more food. I left the others behind and worked my way back to the kitchen where King was working. He didn't mind answering questions as I helped him clean up the morning's mess. He had a real passion for cooking and I was eager to become his best student.

"You could try to control your appetite once in awhile," he said, after I took a huge bite out of a raw onion. "Just taste things a little. Don't gobble them all down at once."

"I feel like I've never eaten anything in my life. Is there any way I can shove all the food you've got into my mouth at one time?"

"Don't even think about it," he said and laughed.

I sampled at least twenty-seven new flavors before I lost track. King mentioned names like oregano, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers, but I couldn't keep the labels connected to the objects. My mind was still fuzzy when it came to memory. The list of edible goods to indulge in went on and on as I dug deeper into the shelves surrounding me. It was the best culinary experience of my life, as far as I could remember.

"There's a garden in the field behind the base. I'll show it to you later," King said. "I've got a fence for chickens. That's where we get the eggs. And I'll also like to herd cows for milk, if I can find any. It's the strangest thing, the way the cows have all disappeared."

He showed the ranger sketches of his plans for a full-blown farm in the area, after the tour of the base returned to the kitchen, just in time for lunch. I already had a pot of something called vegetable stew cooking and Amelia nodded, giving a look of surprised. "A very avid disciple of gastronomy you have already become."

"When you consider the size of New Cargo, this base is certainly understaffed," the ranger admitted after we sat down to eat. "You definitely could use more help in this region." Then he turned to me. "Why not stick around, Lewis, and be a part of the team?"

"You mean I have a choice?" I asked, realizing for the first time that I wasn't being forced to stay here.

"Of course you do," Amelia said.

"Where would I go?" I asked. "Are there more people like us?"

"Some of the people out there would welcome a young man like you into their lives in a heartbeat," the ranger said. "But most would not. Until you understand more about the way this future world works, why not stay here where it's safe?"

I let the question drop, unsure how to answer. They were a tight family burrowing down in the earth right next to the shadow of a ruined city. It was easy to forget about the problems brewing up above after finding a world of food to devour down below. I was starting to feel full for the first time and that was something I wasn't ready to walk away from anytime soon.

In the evening the heavy door at the front opened again and we went above ground to the see the ranger off. He was due at the next base by sunrise and would be driving most of the night. I bound up the stairs two at a time, rushing out of the shelter. Birds were passing by in the sky and I waved my arms at them as if I could fly.

Freedom, the smell of fresh air, no cars on the road, no long lines of people pushing and shoving, no one killing someone just for something to eat, with all that bundled together, I could see the appeal of living here in this future. I extended my arms outwards and spun in a circle, letting my head grow dizzy and liking it. Deon joined me in my foolish antics, laughing and jumping as we raced together across the field.

I tripped over something, took a roll, and sat up, clutching my knee. Laid out in a rough grid across the field was an odd collection of aged stones. On them were names and dates. The one closest to me stated:

JONATHAN BRIGHAM TENNYSON

1912–1984

Here and there I made out more headstones in the weeds, a number of them either fallen over or broken off at the base. It meant nothing to me, so I returned to where the ranger's motorcycle was parked.

He said goodbye and put on his helmet. Then he throttled the bike to life, turned the wheel away, and sped off down the road. In the distance were mountains, black towering giants peaked with snow, stretching out in the setting sun. Soon the ranger was lost in the shadows below these monsters and we turned around and walked down the steps and into the safety of the base.

I was the last one down the stairs. Before I closed the door I took one more look up at the sky and saw the first hint of stars appearing in the night. Something inside me wanted to stay outside longer, if possible, not yet ready to wander deep into the cold earth. I thought I heard a voice calling my name, something barely audible to the ear yet clear enough when I opened my mind to it. It sounded like the call to venture out and explore this strange new world I had just discovered.

"Nobody stays out after dark," Lucerne said and pulled me inside. "You don't know what's out there."

"Stop pretending you're a ranger," I said as I slammed the door. "He's gone now."

She turned and stomped away without saying a word.

I went back to my room and sat down on my bed, leaning back against the wall, my feet dangling over the side. The back of my leg began to itch just below the knee and I pulled my pants up to take a look. At first I thought maybe I had scratched my leg when we were playing outside. But just below the surface of my skin was something blue. The piece of crystal lodged there was glowing faintly, pulsing. And deep inside my chest, I could feel my heart beating in the same steady rhythm.

I tried to pull the crystal out of my leg and suddenly felt light-headed. I dug deeper with my fingernails, felt a stinging sensation, and then pulled harder. The piece came out and fell from my hand and landed on the floor. As I watched, the pulsing faded. It was blue, then less blue, and then none at all, until only a speck of blackened ash remained on the floor. And with its demise I could feel my heart fading as my memory slipped away.

I slumped over in bed and lost all track of time.

#  The City

I woke in the middle of the night, my skin glowing pale-blue in the darkness. I sat up in bed, the room filled with an unnatural aura emanating from my body. The walls shone brightly as I waved my hands in the air, as if blue fireflies were dancing around me, lighting up a void in space deep under the ground.

The color reminded me of fluorescent paint. I was surprised I knew anything about paint, and slowly, thoughts of who I used to be seeped into my head. I had been a street artist, painting masterpieces on the walls of the city. But that was in another life. Already a hundred years or more had passed since then. I could hardly remember those days anymore.

I tried to wipe the glow off my arms with my hands, but it wouldn't go away. My head was pounding like it was on fire. I slumped over and faded into a delirious sleep. I imagined children dancing in a circle around me, calling me names in a language I didn't understand. Morning came too slowly.

In my room underground were lamps fixed to the walls. Above each lamp was a vent. The vents kept the smoke from filling the room. With autumn now settled in and winter approaching, a draft passed under the door, the warm air moving up through the vents and out into the open air above ground.

A chill ran down my back. I kept the blanket wrapped around my shoulders as I walked around and re-lit the lamps with wooden matches I'd found in a box in the corner. The room grew warmer as the lamps blossomed. Fresh air vented in from the space under the door.

Once the lamps were blazing, the glow on my arms disappeared from view. Still, when I shielded my eyes with my hand and looked closely at my skin, there was something there, a faint trace of blueness merging with my flesh, pulsing through my veins, enveloping my existence.

I dressed quickly, the floor cold, and then walked out into the kitchen and waited for a reaction. Deon and Lucerne were already there, shoving food in their mouths. King was about to sit down to eat. They hardly noticed me. None of them could see the blue fire twisting and turning and overtaking my body. I pulled up a chair and sat down with relief.

King handed me a plate. I reached for a fork, but then grabbed Lucerne's hand instead. It was an impulsive thing. When our skin touched there was no reaction other than the sudden look of disgust she threw at me. She withdrew her hand in a flash and mimed a swift blow to my head.

"Are you ready to get out of here today?" Deon asked.

"You mean you're gonna let me out of my cage?"

"We need to find the blue crystal you ran into, that stuff that was burning up your leg," Lucerne explained. "Amelia wants the location marked on the map and a barricade set up around the area, so we won't accidentally run into it again. Do you think you can find your way back?"

"No problem. Just be sure to bring enough to eat. I still get pretty hungry sometimes."

"How do you know you can find it?"

"Don't worry. I can find it."

I would have said anything to see the open sky. I wasn't really thrilled with confined spaces. After breakfast we filled our backpacks with supplies for the trip into the city, including a separate container of egg and potato salad for each of us, something King had thrown together earlier in the morning. Even with breakfast just over, I was hungry enough I could have eaten it on the spot.

Amelia had given us a map of the city. We needed to mark the exact location of the blue crystal after we located it. Those were her instructions. She had also given us a box of red chalk which we could use to score the outside of the building with, by the door and on the corners, so none of us would ever make the mistake of venturing inside that place again. She would have come with us but was already too old to be roaming around the world looking for answers. Lucerne insisted we go through a checklist before she opened the door to the outside world: pocket knives, compasses, maps, candles, matches, food, water, notebooks, pencils, and a box of red chalk. Deon had forgotten to fill an extra water bottle for me. Spare water was his job.

"Looks like I'm not the only one with memory problems," I said and pretended to bonk him on the head with my elbow.

He smirked and threw a phantom explosion of air at me with his bare hands.

"Whenever you're ready, we can get started," Lucerne said, eyeing us like we were imbeciles.

"Whenever you're dead, we can get some relief around here," I came back, just as fast.

I made her wait as long as I possibly could. King had boiled water for drinking the night before and it had cooled down considerably by now. I hefted a black kettle and poured some of the water into my drinking bottle until the level was nearly overflowing, and then I let some spill on the floor. Intentionally blind, I hunted around for a rag to clean the mess up with, looking everywhere but in the most obvious places. After an eternity had passed, I threw my bottle in my backpack and pointed at the door.

Lucerne looked like she regretted every moment we spent together. I threw back an effigy of fearlessness. She muttered something about my thin state of mental health. I pantomimed a gigantic replica of a chicken. Deon laughed.

She opened the door to the outside world and led us up the stairs single file. When the sunlight hit my face I surged forward, pushing past her, reveling in my freedom. While life underground might be safer, I needed the open air more than anything right now. I dance in a circle out in the field and tried to grab clouds out of the sky.

The blue glow was no longer visible on my skin, not even when I looked closely, shielding my face from the sun and peering at my wrist like I was trying to read a glow-in-the-dark watch. Deon and Lucerne observed me calmly but then gave each other crazy glances when I noticed them noticing my peculiar behavior. I turned around and walked toward the road.

As we traveled to the dead city I couldn't suppress the thrill of being alive, of doing something different, of not repeating the same day over and over. Every moment was new to me. An unexpected flood of laughter erupted from deep inside and I ran over and shook hands with Deon as if I'd never met him before.

"Pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you," I said with a smile stretched across my face. "My name is Lewis Fuller and I'm fifteen years old today."

"You going weird on us again?" he asked, pointing his finger at my head like a gun.

"No," I said and bent his finger back at him. "Bang. You're dead."

"No, you're dead."

"No, you're dead."

"Shut up or you're both dead," Lucerne said and ushered us forward.

I took in the spectacle of wild flowers growing everywhere and wondered if it might be possible to learn the name of every single plant. Some of them had to be edible, I was certain. The scents of living things everywhere around me passed over me in waves, engulfing me, overwhelming my senses, leaving me in a state of uncontrollable giddiness. The day couldn't possibly get any better than this.

Then I saw it, the city, an ugly spire of mingled waste rising on the horizon in front of us. Something wasn't right there.

Lucerne, in the lead, picked up the pace, energy pumping through her slender legs, looking radiant, as if the sunlight itself had entered her veins and was now emitting from the center of her heart. As intense as her beauty was, though, the darkness of the menacing city growing taller with every step we took was difficult to ignore.

Deon and I began to tease each other. We pretended to shoot at each other with guns made out of air, lunging and turning, falling on the ground and rolling in pantomimed agony whenever a bullet struck home, then jumping forward and returning fire whenever someone's back was turned.

Lucerne pushed on, putting some distance between us. "You're moving too slowly," she called back.

"Remember that bicycle shop we found when we were hunting down Lewis?" Deon asked.

"I'm pretty fast on a tricycle," I said, laughing, but then regretted it after seeing the painful look on Lucerne's face.

"Are you sure you're not five years old?" Deon goaded me.

I turned a little, motioning for him to wait.

"What's wrong with her today?" I whispered.

"It's probably that ranger stuff. She really wants to be one."

"So? What's stopping her?"

"You have to be invited to join. You can't apply for it."

"And?"

"As of yet, no one has invited her. She hoped to get an offer yesterday, but no dice."

She took us on a detour in the direction of the bicycle shop. Along the way I grew disoriented, lost in a vast maze of cross-streets and hubs that made up the inner-city of New Cargo.

As we passed through a narrow alley I noticed something familiar on one of the walls. Depicted here was the image of a girl, so real that I thought I could reach out and touch her. It had been painted by a true artist, a master of emotional representation, I was sure. My heart raced for a moment and I thought maybe I knew her. Then a cold breeze came around the corner and blew my hood up over my head. Just that fast, the feeling disappeared.

"I think that's a hospital," I said. "We can find medical supplies in there."

"How do you know?" Lucerne asked.

"I just know."

"Sounds like you know a lot of things today," she said.

"More than you ever will," I snapped.

"Try and remember where you saw it. We can come back later and check it out. Right now, we need to keep moving."

When we reached the bicycle shop the doors were still locked. The dirt covering the windows was so thick I almost sneezed when I looked inside. The leaves were gone, blown away, lost in a world of uncertainty.

Lucerne found a monster-sized rock and threw it at the window. I ducked down, shielding my head with my arms as the glass crashed into a million shards. The impact of the rock was accompanied by the sudden sound of air exploding. The boom echoed up and down the streets. We waited for a moment, frozen in place, to see if anyone would arrive on the scene. When it looked like we were safe, Lucerne motioned for us to go inside.

"How do you know we aren't being followed?" I asked.

"They usually only come out at night," Deon said.

"Who? Who lives here, anyway?"

"You don't want to know."

The bikes lining the walls of the shop were all the same sort of dark-red color, as if they'd been hand-dipped in blood and left out to dry in an oven of intense heat. I ran my hand along one of the frames and flakes of rust rained down on the floor. The paint had disappeared long ago. After a hundred years or more, the tires on the bikes had disintegrated as well, falling from the wheels, leaving lumps of black crud beneath them. The only thing remaining on the rims was a mesh of fragile wires.

After searching around the rear of the shop we found a wooden crate a storage room. Deon broke the lock open with a crowbar. Inside were bicycle accessories packaged in airtight containers, which had kept them in good condition over the years. We pawed through spare tires, tubes, tools, chains, and grease and oil, until we found everything we needed. Then we hauled it all out onto the showroom floor.

It took us a while to get three of the bikes working again. Even then they sang in an unholy tune, screeching as we forced them down the road, the pedals working the chain against the gears. I meandered erratically over broken pavement and exposed tree roots, hardly daring to look up out of fear I'd fall over.

"This isn't working. We're going to have to ditch these," Lucerne announced abruptly, no more than a few blocks away from the store.

"Why?" I asked.

"Someone will hear us," she said. "It's just not safe."

"Who?"

"Scavengers," Deon said. "They're probably tracking us already."

"I thought you said we were safe in the daylight."

"I said they usually only come out at night."

I threw my hands up in the air. The handlebars flipped and I fell on a pile of leaves. Where they'd come from, I didn't know.

"We can't leave them here, either," Lucerne said. "Someone will see the new parts and know we've been in the area."

"Great," I said as I got up. "That's just great."

"Lewis, you've got to start thinking more defensively when you're in the city. Our lives depend on it."

She was right, but I wasn't ready to admit it. Reluctantly, I picked my bicycle up, spun around in a circle, and let go. The bike rolled across the street and hit a wall. I walked over and kicked it. Leaving it lying there on the sidewalk, I took off in a hurry. But when I was about a block away I stopped and waited at the corner. There was no sense in getting lost again.

They rolled their bikes over to an opening in a building, a place where a section of wall had disappeared, and stopping just short of going inside. Lucerne launched her bike forward and it landed with a crash somewhere in the dark. Deon did the same with his bike and looked at me. I crossed my arms and waited. He scowled, then picked my bike up and kissed it goodbye with a swift push into the hole in the building.

We wandered the streets in unpredictable patterns in case anyone had heard us. I got turned around again. Everything looked the same. My memory still wasn't functioning as well as it should have been. At one time I had known these streets like the back of my hand, but now a forest had taken over every part of the city and that made it difficult to recognize old landmarks.

Lucerne really had the makings of a ranger. Secretly I hoped she'd realize her dream some day, but at this moment I wasn't ready to tell her that. It was so easy for her to plot a course around the obstacles we encountered. We came across a street blocked with cars piled up so high it would have taken us all day to climb over them. She found an alley and brought us to the next open intersection without much effort. I smiled, though, when she finally stopped and waited for me to lead the way.

"It's over here," I said.

"How do you know?" Deon asked.

"I just know," I said, without really knowing how I knew.

"We have to be certain," Lucerne stated.

"I'll check it out. Be right back," I said and ran inside before they could stop me.

After lighting a candle, I swung the flame in an arc around the room. Most of it looked harmless enough, desks and chairs covered in layers of dust and a row of filing cabinets hugging the wall. But it felt like the right place.

In one corner I thought I saw something move. A tree was growing there, having broken through the floor, but it wasn't like any tree I'd seen before. This one was covered in crystal scales. A strange blue ooze leaked out of the roots and ran across the floor in streams, disappearing into the cracks. As I watched, more roots and branches formed, glowing and pulsing, as if brought to life by the light of my candle. When I leaned in closer, a thin branch reached out to touch my arm. I got the impression that it wanted to hold on to me forever. I jumped back and flew out the door.

"This is it," I said. "Give me the red chalk."

"Is it safe? Can we take a look?" Lucerne asked.

"Sure, but don't touch anything," I said and led them inside. "See that blue thing over there that looks like a tree, over in the corner?"

"It just doesn't make any sense," she said. "How did it get here? I've never seen anything like that before."

"It doesn't have to make sense. Now that we know where it is, we can be more careful next time."

"Right. Got it. Time to go," Deon said and dashed out the door.

"Are you sure you're alright, Lewis?" Lucerne asked in the flickering candlelight.

Alone now, I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder. She drew closer, waiting for me to speak. I looked deep in her eyes. The room grew still.

"I'm fine," I said.

"I like you. But you're unpredictable," she said. "I need stability."

"But I've got it under control. I'm not dangerous."

She smiled a faint smile and slipped my hand off her shoulder and walked out into the sunlight.

"I like you, too," I whispered after she was gone. I promised myself I would try to act normal from now on, or at least, I'd try to be a lot more like everyone else. If that was possible, I didn't know.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust once I was back outside. I tried to mark the wall by the doorway with red chalk but the outside of the building was crumbling so much that the chalk broke off in my hand and landed on the sidewalk along with a pile of debris. Lucerne took out another piece of chalk and rubbed it long ways up and down the side of a tree branch. Then she propped the stick against the entrance of the building after she'd closed the door.

We piled up more wood in front of the door in the same way and scratched red chalk on each piece until it was impossible to get inside without moving the branches or noticing the bright red warning color. Before leaving the area we marked the first-floor windows on this side of the building with more red colored sticks. It would have taken us until tomorrow to mark every entrance on every side, so we left it at that.

For the rest of the day we scouted the buildings nearby. On the map we scratched out the names of places up and down the street, department stores and office buildings and convenience stores and then more department stores and office buildings and convenience stores. It all seemed the same to me, lots of old places with lots of old stuff. We looked for anything salvageable, such as clothes sealed in airtight packages, things like that which might not have disintegrated.

We weighed the importance of what we could take with us against what we should leave behind, once our backpacks were full. We also marked directions on the map to the stuff we thought we might want to come back for later. It was hard to say what we might need in the future. Many of the buildings looked already ransacked, confirming Lucerne's fear that we weren't the only scavengers in the area.

The trip back to the base was a quiet one. We formed a straight line and marched until we got there. I spent most of the time staring at the back of Deon's shoes and thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. With so many roads to go down, how could I choose the right one? How was I to know where each road might take me? I wasn't exactly happy about going back underground, not after a day of freedom out in the sun, but when we arrived I couldn't see any other choice.

The map we had worked on in the city was not only on paper but also a map in my mind. My homework was to remember as many details about the city as I could. My test was to recall the facts later for Amelia. In the evening after we'd eaten, I stood before her desk, reciting the list of things of interest we had encountered during the day. Amelia looked over our notes carefully as Deon and Lucerne confirmed the accuracy of my report.

Over the next few weeks, I scored high marks while we continued to work on this mapping system. I impressed Amelia with my quick recovery during what she called my re-education period. I pushed myself to remember more and more about each outing we took, attempting to recite flawlessly what we'd seen when we got back to the base. If I could prove I was reliable, Lucerne might begin to take me seriously.

On our days off from venturing into the city, I listened avidly to Amelia's lessons in her classroom. Often I was astonished when she pulled old information out of the back of my mind, bringing to the surface things I'd forgotten long ago, as if she were digging up by the roots plants nearly strangled from a lack of sunlight and giving them a new place to grow. Many of the topics we covered I would have never known I knew anything about, if it hadn't been for her. In places where she thought my education was lacking she filled in the gaps.

We were given a list of things that were needed to keep the base running. We were supposed to keep our eyes open for cooking utensils, notebook paper, candles, matches, and so on. These were considered high priority items and we snatched them up whenever possible. Department stores were the best. We made a game out of it. Whoever found an important item on the list got to eat lunch first. Meanwhile, the other two had to stand at attention and watch the street for danger without ever moving a muscle. If someone swayed even a centimeter, the game would start all over again.

Whenever I found something in demand, I ate as slowly as I could, eyeballing Lucerne and Deon like a hawk. Lucerne hardly ever lost during these challenges, standing motionless as if she were a soldier at a war memorial. More often it was Deon who would flop down on the ground from exhaustion when I was only half-way through my meal. And then he would have to repeat the challenge all over again the next day, and the day after that, until he earned his freedom.

We continued to live like this for weeks at a time, scouring every conceivable hiding place in the city. But however long we spent there during the day, we always raced home before the sun dropped below the horizon at night, wary of what might be lurking in the shadows.

King mostly kept to himself, digging through ancient cookbooks and trying to invent new treasures for us to sample, some of which were great to eat and some that tasted revolting. On those days, when we out were in the city, we never told him about the food we dumped on the streets and left behind for animals to eat. But most of the new dishes he came up with were incredible.

His garden was looking shabby by now, with winter just around the corner. The chickens clustered together, attempting to stay warm as the cold wind blew out of the north. King had dried and prepared enough food to last for several months. We weren't alarmed about going hungry. Still, nothing he pulled out of storage ever tasted as good as the food we had been eating fresh out of the garden.

Amelia hid away in her room, reading books and writing notes. Whatever kept her so distracted, I couldn't say, because she seldom shared any information. Little did I care. We had our world and they had theirs. Once we were out in the city, we lived by our rules. Whatever went on at the base while we were gone, that remained a mystery that none of us cared to solve.

Slowly, the blue glow dissipated from my skin and I nearly forgot about it. I fell into a routine, now that my mind was working on all levels. I even took up painting, something I'd been good at in my past life, which was over a hundred years ago, so they liked to remind me. I had been a street artist, an exceptional one. I was sure of it.

How much of the story of Tarkentower was true, I couldn't say. If it hadn't been for the abandoned state of the decaying city nearby, I might have never given the past another thought.

# Part Two

#  Dead Man

One day we were out on a routine inspection of the city when out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the sky flicker. It looked like the atmosphere had disappeared. Up above, there was this dark area where the blue sky should have been. In that vast expanse above my head I could see all the planets and the sun and the stars.

The really weird thing about it was that it looked like the whole universe had been squashed flat, as flat as a piece of paper. Distant stars were suddenly really close. And I could see details in the planets that moved around those stars, even cities, and odd looking airplanes flying in the off-colored atmosphere that surrounded them.

One of those planets looked a whole lot like earth and as I peered closer at it I thought I saw myself standing in the driveway in front of my house, waving hello to somebody. The experience happened so fast that when I thought about it later I wondered if I might have been mistaken.

The sky flickered a few more times and each time I thought I could see something different hidden in the depths of the cosmos. But each time it happened, it was like watching in a movie with the scenes all out of sequence. The story appearing in the sky didn't make any sense. One minute I was an adult on the lawn waving goodbye to my neighbor who was moving away and the next I was an old man trying to open the door to my car with a coat hanger because I'd locked my keys inside. Then I was a young student going to college and dating a girl who didn't really like me.

After the flickering stopped, the sky started to sizzle as if it were on fire. Intense colors moved around at furious speeds which then resolved into a simple mosaic of black and white alternating dots. During the whole time, which lasted only half a minute or so, there was absolute silence, except for the sound of a muffled voice calling out to me.

"Close..."

"...your..."

Out of nowhere came this blinding flash of light and after that I couldn't see much. The immediate world around me looked as if the night had just swallowed the sun. I saw shapes moving toward me, shadows shifting in the pale light, but I couldn't make out any details. Disoriented beyond belief, I stayed in one place, afraid to go anywhere.

"...eyes," Deon whispered in my ear.

"Wait for your vision to clear," Lucerne said and took hold of my elbow like she was helping a blind man.

The sights I'd glimpsed of my own life passing by without any sense of purpose filled me with a burning dread. My future wasn't supposed to be so depressing. I was supposed to become somebody important. In the possible lines of time I saw, nothing mattered. I had escaped the past only to end up in another nonstop routine, another version of the same day happening over and over. Rage boiled over in my soul. I wanted to lash out at someone, anyone.

More than anything, I hated everyone right now. Seeing my bleak future was an emotional overload. On impulse, I reached for a round wobbly shape just within my scope of vision. I latched on to Deon by the front of his shirt and I pulled him closer. Then I smacked him in the nose with my fist as hard as I could. There was a thud as he went down.

Then somebody was on top of me, pinning me down to the ground. I could feel the shape of Lucerne's body holding me in place. Her arms and legs were stretched out in an X, making it difficult to move. I tried to wiggle free but she pressed down even harder.

"Let me go," I whispered, hardly able to breathe.

She jumped up and backed away. "You're out of control."

I stood up and walked over to Deon. He flinched when I extended my hand to help him. I took one look at his nose and pulled the first-aid kit out of my backpack. He was going to need a lot of cotton to stop the bleeding.

"What just happened?" I asked, after we'd sat down on the sidewalk together.

"Star Burn," Deon said. "I guess we should have warned you about the possibility."

"You mean like when someone from the past gets transported into the present?"

"Yeah," Lucerne said. "That swing you took at Deon really surprised me."

"It surprised me too," Deon said, holding the cotton in place and tilting his head back.

"I just freaked out," I said. "Sorry about that."

"Remind me next time not to stand anywhere near you," he said and let out a weak smile.

"You really think I threw a good punch?" I asked Lucerne, hoping to see a spark there, any sign that she might have finally been impressed by something I'd done. All the same, her face remained vacant like the dark windows watching us from the buildings across the street.

"Sometimes," she said, "when people from the past get moved into the present, they feel a little homesick. You know, they miss the old life. They go a little crazy. I heard about a man who was married and had a family and everything. After he got here, he missed his wife so much he couldn't stop thinking about her. He must have really loved her. On that last day together some intense feelings were shared and then those feelings were compounded over and over again for more than a hundred years."

"So romantic." Deon sneered.

"Stuff it," she said, snapping at him.

He didn't miss a beat. "Oh, come on, admit it. You tell that same story every time. What exactly do you mean by 'intense feelings'? It's pretty easy to imagine what they were doing, over and over again. What guy wouldn't miss that?"

"What happened to him?" I asked her.

"He went crazy after he realized he'd never see his family again. He had this super-human strength, ten times as strong as anybody. And he could break things and lift really heavy stuff. A lot of people got seriously hurt, I heard. Some scientists took him away for testing and they had to put him down. You know what I mean by that? Put him down, like an animal."

She threw her fist up in the air, extended a finger outward like a gun, took aim at a broken window about three stories up in the building across the street, and pretended to shoot.

"What about you?" I asked her. "Who did you leave behind?"

She jumped up and landed in a pose like she was ready to kick my head off. I shielded my face and ducked. But when I glanced up at her, she had backed off, looking confused.

"I'm going to take a walk," she blurted out, rubbing her forehead. "Maybe there's somebody new here."

"Like when I first showed up?" I asked Deon, after she'd disappeared around a corner.

"Yeah, just like that," he said. "Let's hope he doesn't suck this time."

I laughed. "So what do you think of Lucerne?"

"What do you mean, what do I think?"

"You know. You got any feelings for her?"

His head swung around like a pendulum and his eyes froze on me. He dropped the cotton pressed against his nose.

"That Star Burn must have really mixed up your neurons," he said. "Are you sure you're OK?"

"What gives her the right to treat everybody like that?" I demanded. "I'm really tired of it."

"We all have stuff we don't want to talk about. Just give her some space. Once you get to know her, she's pretty cool."

"I sure haven't noticed that side of her yet," I said, rolling my eyes. "Sorry again that I smacked you. No hard feelings?"

"It's all good. You know, probably someday, after King and Amelia retire, I'll take King's place and Lucerne will take Amelia's place running the base. If you're nice to us, we'll let you stay."

"I think she kind of likes you," I joked.

"Now I know you're mental. She'd break your arm in a second if she ever heard you say that," he said and looked up at the sky and let out a stiff huff.

"I think she already wants to break my arm just for being here."

He placed a fake punch on my shoulder. "Sorry I said you suck."

"You did? I don't remember a thing." I shifted on the sidewalk.

"Your name is Lewis Fuller and you're 15 years old," he said, pointing at my head.

We both laughed.

Blank spots were still floating across my vision. I rubbed my eyes, trying to make the darkness go away. When I dropped my hands, Lucerne was racing past me in a hurry.

"Dead man!" she yelled and flew around the corner.

Deon took off after her without offering an explanation. I was left sitting alone on the sidewalk, thinking this might be a game they'd played before, one they hadn't told me about. As I was wondering what the rules might be someone grabbed me from behind. I stood up, backing into him, turning as much as I could to see who it was. Just over my shoulder a set of snapping teeth were about to bite my head off at the neck.

I stepped backward and then threw myself forward, pulling the man off balance. His grip on my shoulders lightened, and when he started to fall over, I twisted to the side and shuffled away. Then I sprinted around the corner to where Lucerne and Deon were hiding. They grabbed me and hauled me inside a building. Lucerne held her hand over my mouth and Deon motioned for me to not to speak. I nodded and they let me go.

The man who had attacked me went stumbling past the door as if he were drunk. As he bound down the street, lurching from place to place, he emitted a howling sound, something like a dog enduring intense pain. And while he wandered, his jaw never stopped working, searching for something solid to bite into. I watched in absolute shock, peering out from the edge of a broken window, until he disappeared.

"What was that?" I asked as I fell down on a pile of decaying telephone books.

Dust swirled up in the air and Lucerne sneezed. She grabbed her nose and signaled for us to freeze. I listening for any sound of movement outside but the street remained empty.

After an eternity had passed, Deon said, "Living dead."

"You mean dead people can come through a Star Burn?"

"Why not?" Lucerne said.

I thought about it for a moment and didn't get it. Then I shrugged my shoulders and waited for an explanation.

She said, "The number of the possibilities that can occur on any given day, when you take into consideration a planet stuffed to the brim with people, are endless. You don't think that a single day goes by and nobody dies? Because of the loop in time, when the clock strikes midnight, the whole earth skips back to the beginning of that exact same day. All the same events are played out over and over. All the people who died on that day come back to life and go through the same motions and then have to die all over again."

"Imagine living and dying and returning to life time after time, for over a hundred years," Deon said, brushing dust off his shoulders. "Imagine what that could do to your brain. Tarkentower was pretty smart to make a machine so powerful that it could put an entire planet on repeat, but he obviously didn't think through the consequences of his actions. Either that or he was insane."

"All that remains in that man are his basic instincts," Lucerne said. "Right now, all he wants to do is eat. He is alive, physically speaking, but there's not much brain activity left in his head. The higher functions have been wiped out by the process of dying and being reborn."

"When I first arrived here, I was really hungry all the time, wasn't I? But how did you know if I was safe to be around?"

"Oh, I could tell you were fine," Deon said, nodding.

"I had my doubts," Lucerne said. "That's why we kept our distance and observed you."

"Thanks for giving me a chance," I said. "But throwing rocks? Isn't there a better way to test someone?"

She shrugged and continued with the story. "According to the legend of Tarkentower, the machine that decides who gets moved forward each time has this big data base with everyone's profile in it. When Tarkentower invented this, this whatever you call it, this plane of existence, he set it up so a computer would randomly pick the next candidate to jump forward in time. And that computer doesn't know who is married and who is mentally unstable or anything at all about the person. It just picks someone and off they go. For all we know, they were locked up in maximum security for atrocious war crimes. Who would want to let a serial killer lose in a world like this, a place where we've got so little protection? What kind of future is that?"

I thought about it for a while. "This Tarkentower, whoever he was, the man who started this whole event, he actually did more damage to the planet than good, didn't he?"

"Some people might like this new life and all the freedom that it provides," Deon said. "Others think we should figure out how Tarkentower started this trip through time and reverse it, if we can. My guess is Lucerne falls into that group. Me, I'm still somewhat new here. I'm in no hurry to go back to my old life."

"You mean there might be a way to change things?" I asked.

Lucerne said, "We just have to find Tarkentower's machine."

"It's here? On this future earth? Right now?" The questions fell out of my mouth.

"No one has found it yet," she said. "But that won't stop me from trying. Once I'm a ranger, I'm going to do something about it."

"Maybe all of time is one big loop, but without a beginning or an end," I theorized. "To make a loop within a bigger loop, Tarkentower had to put a twist in time so that approximately one day would occur over and over. The earth exists in both loops, the smaller loop, with all the people trapped in it, and the bigger loop, which we are experiencing now."

"You're catching on fast," Deon said. "I think Tarkentower's machine might be using a worm hole in our solar system to move people from the past into the present. How else could you get out of a loop in time? Whenever the hole opens up, the computer sends someone to the future, allowing that person to escape the smaller loop and move forward into the bigger one."

"That's a good theory," Lucerne said and smiled. "Now I think we're getting somewhere."

"And so we just have to find this machine and blow it up, right?" I asked.

"No. That won't change anything. We have to figure out how it works and use it to go back in time and stop all this from ever happening in the first place," Deon said. He sat down on a chair and held his head in his hands liked it hurt from thinking too much.

"You're assuming we can go back," I pointed out.

"True, but it's something to shoot for," Lucerne said. "Or would you rather be stuck here, running from dead people for the rest of your life?"

"Talking about dead people, we'd better go find our new friend and bag him," Deon said.

He opened his backpack and pulled out a case. Inside was a hefty looking handgun. Lucerne took a dart from the case and shook it, forcing the multicolored liquids inside to mix together. Deon pointed the gun at the floor and pulled back the bolt and inserted the dart.

We walked out of the building, creeping from place to place down the sidewalk, moving in the direction the dead man had gone. Before crossing the intersection, we stopped. Deon took a quick glance around the corner. He shook his head and traded places with me. Next it was my turn to take a look. Hunched down by the building, right around the corner, the dead man was waiting with his face buried in his hands.

"Who am I?" he whispered to himself.

Tears trickled down between his fingers, hitting the ground by his feet. He sounded sincerely lost, but as I listened, the sobbing in his voice changed. Each time his wail grew less sad, as if the tears were now being forced out of him. Then he stopped crying altogether and started snarling like a rabid dog.

Lucerne took a quick look, after we traded places. "Relapse," she whispered. "Get ready to move."

In that split second the dead man spun around the corner and lunged at us. Lucerne fell backward, arms behind her, legs shooting skyward. She planted her feet directly into the man's chest as he tried to tackle her. Then she rolled, her back on the ground. I watched in slow motion as his body flew up and over her head.

He smashed down like a flattened ball several paces away, bouncing one time on the back of his neck. A cracking sound cut through the air as his spine snapped. He lay there inert for a moment, twitching like a puppet without strings, before he stood back up. It didn't seem to matter that he couldn't hold his head in an upright position. All he wanted to do was bite something.

We split up and ran in three directions. He came after me. No matter how much I dodged from side to side, I couldn't shake him from my heels. Halfway down the street, I darted into a building and turned to face my attacker.

He entered behind me and we squared off, hands on each others shoulders. I studied the disturbing look in his eyes, searching for any sign of sanity there, but saw nothing identifiable. Then he surged forward, pushing me across the room. I toppled backward, landing flat on my back. Without thinking I threw my feet up in the air like I'd seen Lucerne do, but not with the catlike agility she possessed, and waited for the man to fly over my head. That's where he stuck, learning into me, arms outstretched, hands grasping for my throat, my feet against his chest.

He shifted his attack to clawing at my legs. He attempted to take a bite out of me, but because his neck was broken he failed to sink his teeth into anything solid. The whole time, while I watched in horror, his jaw never stopped working. His strength increased as the seconds passed. My knees started to bend and he hands grabbed for my neck again. I knew I couldn't hold him back much longer.

I scanned the floor for a weapon, anything I could use to bash his head in. Across the room something caught my eye, a charcoal-colored rock. As I reached for it, the rock began to glow a cold shade of blue. The glow held me spellbound for a moment and I forgot all about the dead man hunched over me. The bluish color deep inside the crystal was pulsing and the pulsing matched the sound in my ears of the beating of my heart. Yet I couldn't reach it.

My legs were on fire, screaming for me to give up. I searched the room once more, but there was nothing I could use to defend myself, not within reach. I glanced back at the piece of blue crystal. It was pulsing faster now, just like my heart, accelerating under the strain. I reached out for it and this time it looked a little closer. I stretched my arm as far as I could and the rock slid across the floor toward me. It picked up speed and jumped into my hand like a magnet. I felt an intense burning, so much pain that I almost dropped it. Then I shoved it into the mouth of the dead man hanging over me and watched in shock as his bit into it. His teeth shattered and a bluish slime formed on his lips and chin.

He made the mistake of swallowing. It didn't go down well. His neck bulged where the rock had lodged. And then his face developed a bluish glow all its own. I could hear the straining sound of his lungs as they tried to take in fresh air. Before I knew it he fell down on the ground next to me. To my relief, he stayed there, curled up in a fetal position, his fingers clawing at his throat, ripping away pieces of his own flesh.

Then he stopped moving altogether. From out of nowhere a blue crystalline substance spread across his skin. Fragile lines were crisscrossing his body, forming a spider web all around him. The lines of the web multiplied rapidly, enveloping him in a rock-like cocoon.

As soon as the cocoon hardened, Lucerne ran into the room. The dead man was now only a frozen egg-shaped form. But something was still wriggling about inside the shell, changing, growing, evolving. Without hesitation, Lucerne picked up a blunt object, a paperweight on a desk that had been too far out of my reach, and used it to smash the cocoon into a million pieces. We jumped back as shards of blue crystal spread out across the floor. Most of it went under the desk. Something foul smelling and gooey in the center of the floor twitched a time or two and died. Within seconds the blue faded from the remaining pieces of crystal and they turned as black as new formed coal.

"Where is it?" Deon yelled, running into the room.

"We killed it," Lucerne said, collapsing against the wall.

"How?" he asked.

"I don't know," Lucerne said. "Ask Lewis. By the time I got here, the thing was locked inside a glass shell. I smashed it to pieces."

"Tell me exactly what happened," he said, lowering the gun and pointing it at the floor. He moved from side to side, looking under the desk for something to shoot.

"The thing ran after me," I said, still out of breath. "I tried to do that same kick-and-fly move I'd seen Lucerne do. Only I wasn't so smooth about it. The thing was right on top of me, trying to bite my leg off. And then I found this rock and smashed it in the head. After that it fell over on the floor and started convulsing. And then its skin hardened and that's when Lucerne ran in and destroyed it."

"So where's this rock now?" he asked. "It must have been pretty big. All I see are pieces."

"I don't know. It was just some lose rubble from the building. It's around here somewhere," I said. I scanned the room as if I expected to find it.

"Twice now you got away from a dead man," he pointed out. "I find that hard to believe."

"You're the one with the gun. Why didn't you shoot it?"

"We can talk about this later," Lucerne interrupted. "Sun's going down now. Better pack up and head back home before it gets too dark."

She picked up her backpack and marched out the door. Deon dismantled the gun and put it away before following her. He took one more look at me before disappearing down the street.

"Why the hurry?" I yelled as I ran after them. "Why can't we stay here tonight?"

"Mutants," Lucerne said.

"Scavengers," Deon echoed.

"Yes, I know that. But who are they?"

"You think the dead man was a problem?" Lucerne asked. "You haven't seen anything yet. Trust me. I know."

I looked behind us as we left the city. For a second I thought I saw something moving in the shadows, but when I looked again it was gone.

We ran all the way back to the base as the sun slipped below the horizon. I skipped across the loose boards inside the shed and ran down the stairs two at a time. Deon waited for me to enter and then locked the door behind us.

It wasn't until I was back inside my room that I paused long enough to catch my breath. Just below my knee, the back of my leg was itching again. I turned down the lamps and my skin glowed a soft blue. I had completely forgotten about my contact with the blue crystal when I'd first arrived on this future earth. It had been so easy to get lured into a false sense of safety, the way life was going. I should have known better. Things here were not as simple as I wanted to believe. I only hoped I would be ready for whatever was about to happen next.

#  Night Run

Lucerne was lying on my bed when I returned from dinner. I was half-undressed before I noticed her there. She sat up and looked at me like she wanted something.

"Why'd you stop," she teased.

"I'm all yours," I replied.

"Come with me," she said. "I want to show you something."

I put my shirt back on before she led me out the door.

We wandered down a long hallway where shadows danced at strange angles on the walls, swaying under the influence of our candlelight. Through underground chambers and past abandoned rooms that had once been the homes of saints now long forgotten, she took me in a direction I'd never gone before. As we moved deeper and deeper, I worried that she might leave me somewhere in the farthest recesses of this place and tonight would be the end of my story on this planet.

We came to a hall where the air smelled fresher and I could feel a cold breeze rushing past my face. She climbed up a narrow staircase and motioned for me to follow. At the top, large rocks had fallen down in a rough pattern, blocking the steps. I got down on my knees next to her and looked through the rubble. There was a hole, a space just big enough for someone to slip though.

Once we'd gotten past the rocks, we were in an open field. Under the moonlight she looked unbelievably beautiful, like an angel in the night.

"Get down," she whispered, pulling on my hand.

"Why?" I blurted and fell down next to her.

"Follow me, but stay low."

She crawled along the ground ahead of me and I watched her go until she nearly disappeared in the dark. Then I followed on my hands and knees through the tall weeds. We stopped when we were almost out of the field. From here I could see for miles in either direction, up and down the road. I thought she would get up once she was sure it was safe, but she continued to wait and I grew restless.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Just wait," she said. "Just a little longer."

I scanned the road between here and the city. Out on the horizon, the tall buildings looked like an endless range of black mountains backed up against a blacker night. Then there was movement, the shadows of people at the base of the buildings, someone coming this way. As they got closer I could see more details: leather jackets and burning torches held close to unwelcoming faces, with threatening tools in their hands, spikes of steel that had been broken off old buildings, things which might be useful for prodding someone in a fight. When they were almost on top of us they stopped.

"Can they see us?" I whispered.

Lucerne put her finger to her mouth and glared at me like she'd kill me. I nodded and she looked back at the road.

"Who are they?" I barely spoke the words this time.

"Once a week they go up into the mountains."

I could hardly hear her, so I moved a little closer, our faces almost touching.

"What for?"

"See the ones in chains? Those are slaves. They take the people they catch to a place where they make them dig for resources."

"The people are cargo?" I mouthed and she nodded.

After taking a brief break, during which someone threw a bag of garbage over our heads, they prepared to move on. Before they left I heard something moving behind me. Thinking Deon had followed us out here, I turned to wave and let him know where we were.

Instead of Deon, I saw five figures wandering across the field in our direction. They glowed chemical-blue in the night as if they had been doused with a toxic propellant and set on fire. The way they walked disturbed me more than anything, leaning over at odd angles and dragged their feet. I tapped Lucerne on the shoulder but she'd already seen them.

We lay low, stuck right in the middle of the oncoming battle. This line of mutants, infected by blue crystal, had metamorphosed into something unearthly. As they advanced on the people on the road, I thought they had little chance because they were outnumbered. I held my breath and waited to see what would happen.

The scavengers set up a solid line of defense, positioning their best fighters in the front. But a moment into the fight one of the mutants grabbed a man, wrapping its arms around him, and right there on the spot, just by touching him, infected him with blue crystal. He fell to the side of the road and was transformed into a wiggling cocoon. When the process was complete, his shell split open and he stood back up, this time as infected as the one who had first embraced him.

The scavengers floundered for a moment, confused by this turn of events, but then they formed a new strategy, surrounding each glowing enemy and attacking from all sides. With five attackers to each one, there was little contest. They split them open and blue ooze ran down the road, sending up plumes of putrid steam when it hit the weeds nearby. Eventually the mutants were reduced in number. And then there were none.

After the scavengers regrouped, they continued down the road as if nothing had happened. Lucerne motioned for me to go. We turned around and crawled back toward the hole in the ground. From there we worked our way up different hallways, back to familiar territory.

We woke up Amelia in the middle of the night and Lucerne explained what happened.

"What did you notice?" she asked.

"It's spreading by contact," Lucerne said. "The blue crystal spreads whenever it touches someone."

"Well done," Amelia commended her.

"But we still don't know how to stop it."

"All things take time, my dear, all things take time. Don't worry yourself too much. Just keep your eyes and ears open, like I taught you. Focus your mind."

"One more thing," she said and hesitated.

"What is it?"

"I think Lewis likes me, but he doesn't know how to say it."

I took a step back. "No way!"

"Well, now," Amelia said with a smile, "I'll let you two discover how to handle that mystery on your own." She turned and went back into her room.

I fled down the hall, worried that the blue crystal inside me would hurt Lucerne if we touched. She was right that it was spreading by contact. That's how I'd been infected by it. I wasn't sure why I hadn't turned into a monster yet. Something was different about me.

She knocked on my door, but when I didn't open it, she let out a sigh and wandered away.

#  Outcast

As I was painting the back of the hospital I was confronted by a triad of watchdog robots. I took a can of black paint out of my backpack and sprayed the visual receptors on one of the robots. Totally disoriented, it took a step back. And then it took another. And another. And then it fell right off the sidewalk, which kind of surprised me.

Just then, a stealth-class car came flying by, flattening out the robot like an aluminum can. Red hydraulic fluid shot out everywhere. This was a curious incident, because as far as I knew, cars almost never passed this way.

These tiny dog-bots only had three fingers on their disk-like hands, which meant they couldn't grasp much. I sprayed another one and it scratched at its binocular eyes, but it was already too late. The paint dried that fast.

The two other pint-sized robots began jumping up and down, waving their straw-like arms frantically, as if they could fly. They had acorn-shaped bodies and didn't intimidate me in the least. Someone had once told me that inside them was a pump, something like a heart, which could make the arms and legs straighten out by sending more fluid to them. I didn't know much about how they worked, as technology wasn't my thing. I was an artist.

The car came to a screeching halt and an old man got out. He was dressed in white and had white hair and a white beard. He even carried a white cane, although he didn't look like he needed it. He came over and peered at the remains of the flattened robot. Then he took a step back and glanced up at my masterpiece on the wall.

He stuck his finger in my face and accused me of defacing his hospital. I fought back a laugh, explaining that my work was highly valued art. I'd just finished painting a picture of a girl I liked and thought it matched her to perfection.

He motioned for the other robots to close in on me, and before I knew it, they had electricity pulsing from their fingertips. I'd never known they could do that, so I jumped over one of them and took off down the alley, leaving my art behind.

A few weeks later I saw the old man's picture in the newspaper. He looked like that guy who sells fried chicken, only he didn't wear glasses. They said he was a rare breed of genius, a doctor who could cure almost any disease in the world. Ironically, his wife had died recently in a traffic jam. Although she only needed a tracheotomy, which is a thing where they put a hole in your throat so you can breathe, after you've eaten something you're allergic to, nobody who knew anything about tracheotomies could get to her in time. It was the longest traffic jam in the world, the article said.

The doctor whose eyes looked bleary-red in the black and white picture announced the next day that he would be closing his hospital for good. He would soon begin work on a new project. He said he was going to cure this ailing world once and forever. I thought it was a strange choice of words, because he didn't say once and for all. He said once and forever.

But I soon forgot about all that. I forgot about my street art and my masterpiece. Oddly enough, I started forgetting about a lot of things. It left me feeling empty, like something had been taken out of me and left somewhere and I'd never find it again. I even forgot that I was forgetting, which I didn't realize until later, when I thought back about the experience.

Then came a long period which I couldn't remember much about. I only remember sitting in the classroom one day, a day like every other day, with my head down on the table, pretending to be asleep. I hated school. I hated the world. I wished it all would just disappear.

I noticed the room had suddenly grown really quiet, and when I looked around, nobody was there. Thinking the bell might have rung and I'd missed it, I got up and walked out. But the hallway was empty, too. In fact, the whole school was empty. I wandered past lockers and the door to the gym and then stumbled out a side door and found myself in the middle of a deserted city.

"Hey, where is everybody?" I yelled, but my voice was lost in the emptiness.

And then I was lost on the streets, running from someone throwing rocks at me. And then I was underground looking at the way my arms glowed blue in the dark.

It was hard to tell if these escapes from the present were real or not. Sometimes memories came into my mind that seemed to be happening right now. I made a mental note to ask Amelia about it later.

With the onset of winter closing in, King declared it harvest time. Amelia had mapped out a route for us into the suburbs where we were to look for old gardens by the houses. This might be our last chance to stock up on food for a long time. The big chill was coming fast.

We ate breakfast together in silence. I pretended nothing unusual had happened during the night. Deon glanced at me oddly, but said nothing. Lucerne sat across from me but never made eye contact.

After our backpacks were prepped, we wandered up the stairs and out into the sunlight. The cold air hit me in the face like a block of ice. I bundled my collar around my neck and buttoned my jacket up all the way.

When we arrived on the outskirts of the city, we turned south, navigating the border where the buildings ended and the countryside began. We passed a field overripe with corn growing in wild rows and Deon stopped to pick an ear. To my surprise, he took a bite.

"Cows eat it raw," he said. "Why can't we?"

"I guess so," I said and nibbled on a few kernels. "By the way, where are all the cows?"

"They disappeared," Lucerne joked.

"Disappeared? How can cows disappear?" I asked.

"Nobody knows," Deon answered, motioning with his fingers like he was crazy.

I wandered father out into the field, picking the ripest corn I could find to stuff in my backpack. I came across a dead animal, something in the shape of a cow on its side. It stank like it had died recently. The body was deteriorating fast. Blue crystals clung to bones sticking out of rotting hide. I tried an experiment and reached down and touched the crystals. They came alive, pulsing in time with my heart. The experience was invigorating, warming me to the core.

I heard Lucerne coming up behind me and out of desperation tried to think of a way to protect her from stumbling on the remains of the infected animal. If she tripped and fell on the blue crystals, they would kill her, I was sure. I wished with all my heart the carcass would just disappear. And it did. I froze in my tracks, wondering if this moment was real. The dead animal was gone.

She continued to pick corn, not noticing anything had changed. A shiver went through my body as my brain registered what had just happened. I dropped an unfinished ear of corn on the ground and stood motionless for some time.

"Let's keep moving," she said, tapping me on the shoulder. "We'll find more to harvest by the houses."

I followed her in a daze. We passed pleasant looking homes laid out neatly in rows. They were quaint little dwellings, matching in design, but falling apart nonetheless. We walked down one entire block lined from mailbox to mailbox with edible plants and herbs growing where the front lawns should have been. In most places, the gardens from a hundred years ago should have died, but in rare places like this, they had flourished.

"Halt," Deon called, holding up a fist.

"This looks good," Lucerne said and started stuffing her backpack.

As the shock of what had happened wore off, I was hit by a wave of dizziness. Thinking I might have imagined it, I walked around to the back of the house where I could have more privacy. A half-starved cat wandered in my direction and rubbed its shoulder on my leg. I made it vanish, too.

"What are you doing?" Lucerne asked, startling me as she came around the corner.

"Wishing I had a camera." I tried to hide my uneasiness, yet the words came out in packaged bundles. "Would you take a look at this landscape?"

Stretching out to the horizon the hills and the trees and the gardens created a surreal scene I could never have dreamed up. The old houses covering the land were falling farther and farther into decay with every brush of the wind. Mixed between them were a jumble of corn stalks, tomato plants, pepper plants, and some herbs I couldn't identify, along with a diverging collection of tyrannical weeds.

Lucerne glanced at me sideways and then leaned in playfully, bumping into me with her shoulder.

"I never knew you appreciated beauty," she teased.

I didn't know how to answer. Then I breathed. "I do."

She held her hands up in the air as if she were attempting to capture the world with an invisible camera. But the angle was off and I took her hands and moved them into a better position for a more artistic representation of the scene. When everything was lined up perfectly, I pressed her finger down and said, "Click."

"Did I just hear a cat?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Let's look around."

My mind was still jumbled over what had happened to the cat. I was as eager as she was to find it. We got down on our hands and knees and roamed around the wild garden looking below all the plants, but couldn't find it anywhere.

"Strange," she said and stretched out on her back, looking up at the sky.

"Yeah, strange," I muttered and rolled over next to her.

"What are you two doing in the grass?" Deon asked as he came around the corner.

"Nothing!" Lucerne said and scrambled away on her hands and knees.

With the sun moving across the sky, we went back to work. We filled our backpacks to the brim. We tossed in potatoes on top of corn, because it was least likely to get crushed. Then we threw in tomatoes and peppers. I took a few samples of some of the herbs and wrapped them up, hoping King could identify them later. I had no idea if they were edible, but they smelled enticing.

"King is going to love this," Lucerne said as we prepared to go home.

Before we left we marked details on the map, including the time of year, the position of the sun, and the number of crops we estimated might be growing in the area. Deon had other maps, similar ones, which Amelia had given him, maps from last year and maps from years before that. We compared them and were excited to see that the circle of vegetation in this area was widening. That meant we wouldn't go hungry for a long time.

When we got back to the base, I asked King for a glass of water and took it to my room and locked the door. This time the glass didn't disappear right away. I had to think about it for a while. Then it slowly dissolved into nothingness. Yet when I went over to the table and waved my hand in the place where it should have been, it was still there. I knocked it over and heard water splashing on the floor.

"Are you alright?" Lucerne asked, standing just outside my door.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I replied, frantically looking for a place to hide an invisible object.

"Open up. Let me in. I want to talk to you about something."

"Can we talk later? I'm kind of busy right now."

"You got someone in there with you?" she said and giggled.

"No, I really want to talk to you. But later, OK?"

"OK," she said and sighed. "Later."

I sat down on my bed for a while to think. The carcass of the cow hadn't really disappeared and neither had the cat. They just couldn't be seen. That discovery made me breathe a little easier. I had been feeling guilty about sending an innocent cat off to its death. Where the cat had gone, I had no idea. Lucerne must have scared it when she walked around the corner. Some mouse was bound to be surprised tonight when it became an easy dinner.

I got down on my hands and knees and felt around on the floor until I found the glass. It rolled when I nudged it. I played with it for a little while.

"What a curious object," I murmured, never having noticed the shape until I couldn't see it. The glass was somewhat conical and it didn't roll in a perfect circle.

I picked it up and put it on the table and dried my hands off with a towel. Although I couldn't see any water on my hands, they felt wet. I wrung the towel out over the sink, listening as water ran down the drain. Then I sat down on my bed.

Something was changing inside me, expanding, growing. I had never been able to do anything like this before. Somehow, lately, I was evolving. I could feel it in the back of my mind. Or maybe I felt it some place deep inside the middle of my brain. For the first time I noticed a kind of presence in my body, something not originally a part of me.

For a second I imagined myself disappearing and I ran over to the mirror to take a look. I let out a quiet laugh when I saw my own terrified reflection staring back at me.

"Some kind of freak you are," I whispered, watching my image mouth the words.

I found the glass and stowed it in my backpack. Then I threw the towel on the floor where the water should have been and waited as it shifted shape, absorbing non-visible liquid. Getting rid of the water was easy, since I could twist the towel over the sink and listen as it went down the drain. The glass, on the other hand, I wanted to ditch somewhere far away from the base. I had no idea how anyone would react if they connected it with me. When I finished, I hung the towel by the sink and went out to eat.

"Quite a catch you all brought in today," King said as he served up a healthy bowl of fried peppers and fat noodles. "One or two more trips and we'll be set for winter."

"That place is a real garden of Eden," Lucerne said. "There's no way we'll go hungry now that we know where it is."

"Be aware of other people thinking the same thing," Amelia pointed out.

"What other people?" I asked.

The room fell silent. Deon shifted in his seat and stared at his plate without taking a bite.

"I think it's time we tell you," Amelia said, glancing at Lucerne. "Eventually, you'll figure it out anyway. As you've probably already guessed, we aren't the only people in the New Cargo region. There are other groups here as well. And just like back in the old world, we don't all agree how this new world should be run."

"But you believe in letting people make their own decisions, right?"

"Sure we do. Why do you ask?"

"If I wanted to leave this place and live with someone else for a while, you wouldn't stop me, would you?"

"Of course not. But we'd sure miss you," she said and smiled to reassure me.

I forked up noodles from my plate and stuffed them in my mouth.

"Hey, King, I didn't know you could make Chinese food," Deon said.

"Noodles are easy. Eating them with chopsticks, that's another story."

He got up and walked into the pantry. When he came back he showed us two long wooden sticks. They were pointed at one end and gradually widened at the other. He put them between his fingers like a pair of tweezers and used them to pick up a bundle of noodles. Before he could drop anything, he put them in his mouth.

"Let me try," I said.

He handed me the sticks. I closed my fingers the same way, as if I was holding a plate in my hand. I pointed the sticks down into my bowl and clamped on to some of the noodles. By forcing the sticks together and retracting them, I was able to pick something up. But when I was about to put the bundle of food in my mouth I dropped one of the sticks, sending the noodles flying everywhere.

Deon let out a hollow laugh and it set me off. Before anyone could look under the table, I wished the chopstick would disappear.

Lucerne scanned the floor beneath my feet and asked, "Where is it?"

"It probably rolled under the sink," I said.

"No, nothing could fit under there," King said.

Everyone looked under the table. I pushed my chair back and waited. No one could find it. King looked up at me and I shrugged my shoulders as if I had no idea where it had gone.

"Looks like it just disappeared," Deon said.

"That was my only pair," King yelled. "Do you know how long it takes to make them?"

He grabbed the remaining chopstick and tossed it over his shoulder, shaking his head.

Amelia was looking directly at me, her head turned a little to the side. Her eyebrows went up and she put her hand to her mouth. "I'd like to try an experiment. You don't mind, do you, Lewis?"

I hesitated. "Sure. What do you have in mind?"

"Wait here a minute," she said and walked out of the room.

When she came back, she held a glass tube in her hand. Inside the glass was a sliver of ash, the remnant of the piece of blue crystal she had removed from the back of my leg a long time ago. She walked over and held the bottle next to my face, but I flinched and pulled away.

Out of nowhere, Lucerne grabbed me from behind, pulling me back in the chair by my shoulders, forcing me to sit still. When Amelia moved the glass closer to my face again, I couldn't retreat. Inside the bottle, the blue crystal sprang to life, glowing like an ember in a fire. The glow grew, and as it grew it pulsed, stronger and stronger, in sync with the pulsing of my heart. Deep in the pit of my stomach I felt like I was going to throw up.

King backed away from the table. Deon jumped up and ran toward the hall. Everyone watched me. I stared at the floor, just as shocked as they were about the sudden turn of events.

"This confirms my suspicion," Amelia said, age hanging on her voice. "I know you've wanted to leave us for a long time. Now you'll get your wish."

Lucerne let go of me and I glanced at the door.

"No, not right now," Amelia continued. "We'll let you stay here tonight. But in the morning, when the sun comes up, you'll need to pack your things and find a new home."

I made no objection. I knew I might be a danger to them. I might even be a danger to myself. One by one they left the kitchen without saying a word. Nobody had eaten. When the room was empty I pushed my bowl away.

I went back to my room and sat on my bed, unable to sleep. As the night passed I grew more and more disenchanted with everyone and everything around me. I hadn't done anything to hurt anyone. And now they were throwing me out.

In the morning, I woke up to a candle shining in my face. Amelia was shaking me, telling me to get up.

"Time to go," she said. "Get dressed and meet me at the door."

I grabbed my backpack and threw something in it, not really thinking too clearly about what I should bring. Then I walked past the kitchen without bothering to pick up any supplies. Nothing mattered anymore.

She had already unlocked the door and was waiting to say goodbye. As I climbed up the stairs into the early morning light she tried to give me some parting words of advice, but I ignored her. I heard the door shut quietly and lock behind me and then I wandered out into the world alone.

#  The Ranger

I told myself I was just going for a hike across the countryside. I really didn't want to think about the fact that I was now an outcast and would never be allowed to return to the safest place I knew on earth. I tried to forget I'd ever met them before, the people who had taken me in when I had no home. And who, just as swiftly, for reasons I didn't fully understand, had thrown me out in the cold. I had done nothing to harm any of them, least of all the girl.

Nevertheless, Lucerne lingered in my mind, like the sunlight in the sky. I couldn't block her out. I just couldn't forget the way she looked. I didn't know if I'd ever see her again, and at this moment, forced to fend for myself, I didn't want to think about it too much. I didn't want to fall apart so close to home. I tried to remember the things I liked the most about her, so if I never saw her again, at least I could always recall the way she sparkled when we first met.

As I peered across the horizon in the early morning, searching the landscape for a route to follow, I felt the chilly breeze of winter coming on. I knew I needed to find a place where I could stay that was warm. I decided to follow the road around the city to the other side and possibly onward away from this region, hopeful of finding a place where I could disappear forever, a small town perhaps, nothing as threatening as that dark cluster of towers devouring the horizon.

The air smelled cold, hinting of fresh snow falling in the mountains. Sunlight filtered through my hands, curving around my fingers, highlighting the blood and bone beneath my skin, but it failed to warm me. I saw the colors of the changing seasons buried deep within the texture of a fallen leaf and I pried it apart looking for the reason why I felt older today, but gave up without discovering any answers.

Before long, I began to see signs of dwellings, old farms long abandoned. I skirted the outline of the city when I felt its presence about to devour me. The road curved to the south, toward the suburbs, the same place where I had gathered food with Deon and Lucerne the day before. Food would soon be a priority and so I continued onward in that direction.

Life wasn't going to be easy out here alone, I realized. The changes taking place inside me, something alien growing within, giving me power but at the same time turning me into a freak, it left me feeling confused about which way to go. I really had no idea where my place was in the world today.

Little did that matter. In the end, regardless of the people and the events that had conspired against me, it seemed like I had come full circle since I'd first arrived on this future earth. All I could think about was finding something to eat.

I kept to the middle of the street, kicking at rocks and things as I walked, trying to think about anything other than the fact that I was vulnerable right now. The roads turned and split and branched outwards like a maze of some kind and I followed them blindly. Vacant houses invited me inside, offering me a chance to forget I'd ever been born.

Something moved in one of the windows and caught my attention. It might have been a cat, or the shadow of a cat, or even an invisible cat with a shadow cast in the shape of a cat, or maybe it was just the wind blowing the curtains around. Whatever it was, I stopped in my tracks and scanned the landscape for the safest place to hide.

As soon as I turned a little I thought I saw something move in the same window again. It was white and looked like a flag on a wire, maybe a torn-up bed sheet fixed to a coat hanger.

Whatever it was, it made no sense. After a hundred years of desolation, the land waited in silence like a blanket covering the earth. Time and a lack of use hung on every corner of the house. There was no way something like that could be moving in the window by itself, not unless someone had put it there.

I picked up a rock covered in mud, which ran down my arm as soon as I lifted my hand up in the air. I put my hand down again and wiped the mud off, smearing it on my only pair of pants. Then I approached the house as fast as I could. As I moved closer, I picked up speed, wanting to appear invincible. I raised the rock high above my head and charged right up to the window and threw it inside, screaming in defiance, "Die you mutant!"

Something moved inside the house and after a moment someone opened the front door. An old man with tattered clothes and tangled gray hair appeared on the front steps.

"You broke my window," he accused, pointing a shaky finger at me. "Wait here, I'm gonna call the police."

"What?" I shrieked in disbelief. "You don't have a window."

"Calm down," he said with a chuckle. "Can't you take a joke?"

All sense of adventure had drained out of me. I had no idea what to do next and so I just stood there and stared at him. His face shifted from funny to pale.

"You must be new around here," he said.

"No, I'm not new. I was here a couple days ago."

"Oh. You were with that fat kid and the tall girl. Man, isn't she sweet to look at? Maybe you didn't notice. How old are you anyway? Did you ask anyone if you could take those vegetables?"

"Ask who? Are you insane?" I yelled, backing toward the street.

He looked at me and then at the house. When he turned to go, I panicked.

"Where are you going?" I asked and ran up the steps behind him before he could shut the door.

He stopped half inside and turned around. "You really don't have a sense of humor, do you?"

"You got any food?"

"You're just in time. Come on in," he said and waved me forward.

"I'm Lewis," I said and grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously.

"Well, Lewis, the name is Tennyson. Let's go eat before it gets cold."

The smell of food cooked to perfection swelled in waves all around me. I pushed past him and searched for the kitchen. He entered behind me and dished up two plates of steaming fish covered in soft herbs. We sat down on pillows on the living room floor to eat. It didn't take long to suck my plate clean. I grabbed a second helping from the kitchen without asking.

"Are you an outlaw?" I inquired.

"No."

"Mutant?"

"No."

"Scavenger?"

"No."

"Ranger?"

"Used to be."

"Your name sounds familiar."

"You mean the poet?"

"I don't know. I've heard it somewhere before."

"The poet Tennyson was my great-great-grandfather," he explained. "His family was buried far away from here in another land. But this is where I grew up. In fact, I used to live in this very house when I was a boy."

He wore a heavy jacket and on his shoulder hung a dark shadow where a badge used to be. On his feet, black leather boots, cracked and fading. I watched the meticulous way he ate and was reminded of another ranger I'd met before, yet this man appeared empty in comparison. Missing was the air of authority. It was clear Tennyson had no serious objectives weighing on his mind. He was nobody living in the middle of nowhere.

"So what happened?" I asked. "Why aren't you a ranger anymore?"

"Gave up on it."

"Why?"

"Too many cooks in the kitchen."

"What?" I asked, looking around, but didn't see anyone.

"Too many people trying to reorganize the human race. And no one is really doing anything productive. Too much talk and too little action."

"I think I know what you mean about people," I said after pausing a moment. "They can really suck sometimes."

He watched me eat for a while and then went back to attacking his plate.

"I'm pretty happy being alone, just spending time with my cat," he said. "By the way, did you see a cat the other day? It's been missing for a while."

"About the cat...that's yours?" I fumbled with the words. "It's still here. Somewhere. I think."

"So you did see it then?"

"Yeah."

"And you think it's just right outside somewhere?"

"Yeah. Sort of."

"What do you mean, sort of? You don't eat cats with your vegetables, do you?"

"I'm not crazy!" I said and then realized how much I sounded like Lucerne.

"What is it you're not telling me?" He put his plate down on the floor.

"Well. I'll tell you, OK. But don't freak out. OK? OK??"

"Seriously, calm down. It's a simple question."

He leaned back against the wall and put his hands behind his head. I pretended not to notice he'd slipped a dinner knife inside his sleeve.

"It disappeared," I said abruptly.

"So now you're telling me it's not here. Which is it, here, or not here?"

"It's here. But you can't see it."

"What do you mean, I can't see it?"

"Yeah, sorry. I made it invisible."

At this he thumped his head back against the wall behind him. But he didn't run out of the room like I'd expected.

"Looks like you do have a sense of humor," he said.

"I'm not joking."

He looked at me closely and then looked around. He stood up and grabbed a dusty flower vase from the window sill and put it down in front of me.

"Can you make other things disappear? Make this disappear," he said, waiting, holding his breath.

It only took a second. The vase was gone. He took a step back and stumbled as he reached behind himself for something to hold on to. I closed my eyes and thought about making the whole world disappear.

"What the...?"

"I told you."

"So, is my cat dead?"

"No, it's not dead. You just can't see it right now. Probably it's catching mice by the dozen. At least that should take care of the rodent problem around here for a while."

He walked over to where the vase should have been and extended his leg, feeling around on the floor with his foot. When he came into contact with the vase it was easy to see he had physically bumped into something. He pushed a little harder and that something moved. He pushed again and the sound of the vase falling over spilled out into the room.

After a moment he got down on the floor and felt around with his hands like a blind man until he came across the vase. He picked it up and cradled it in his arms, as if he were afraid he might drop it.

"Now that's cool!" he gasped.

"I guess so."

He put the vase down next to the wall where it was out of the way. Then he picked it up and put it down again, just to be sure it was still there. His face went from amazement to shock to amazement all over again within the span of a few seconds.

A moment later we heard talking outside, the sound of voices approaching.

"Stand away from the window," he said as I stood up. "You can look out from the side, if you're careful. But don't let them see you."

"That kid was a freak. I knew it from the start."

"Drop it."

"Why don't you just drop dead."

"Make me."

Lucerne and Deon were walking past the house. Deon bent over to pick up a rock. He threw it at Lucerne's head, but missed by a long shot. It was enough to set her off. She threw down her backpack and went after him. He ran, but being out of shape, couldn't get far. She grabbed him by the elbow and swung him around, which threw him off balance. Then she let go and he fell.

About the time she was ready to pounce on him, a cat came walking around the corner of the house. She went over to look at it. The cat purred softly as it rubbed up against her long legs. She bent down on one knee and stared into the cat's eyes, holding it by the ears.

"You're here, aren't you? You never disappeared. But how can that be? How?? I thought I saw you vanish," she said, putting her nose so close to the cat's nose that the two almost touched.

"What's up with that? You a cat-loving freak now?" Deon accused. He stood up and brushed the dust off his pants.

Lucerne ignored him, scanning the field around the house with a curious expression on her face.

"Maybe we were wrong about Lewis. When King went into the kitchen in the morning, the missing chopstick was in the sink. And now here's the cat. Maybe we threw him out for nothing," she said, almost to herself. Or maybe she was talking to the houses nearby. Or maybe even to the world growing bigger all around her. But her voice disappeared into depths of the universe without a response.

I couldn't take it anymore. I ran out the front door before Tennyson could stop me. But when they saw me, the curiosity on Lucerne's face and the confusion in Deon's eyes disappeared, turning to rage. What I had expected to be a great reunion dissolved into thin air, leaving me feeling empty and cheated.

"What are you doing here?" Deon demanded.

"Before you take another step, you'd better explain yourself," Lucerne said, holding the cat tightly in her arms as if she were protecting it.

I had flashbacks to when we'd first met. I half expected Deon to pick up a rock and throw it at me.

"You were the ones who threw me out. What did I do? I never hurt anyone," I blurted, a tempest moving just under the surface of my skin. I quickly glanced at my arms to see if they'd turned blue, but there was no visible evidence of what I was feeling inside.

Deon yelled, "You've been following us!" He slid sideways, positioning himself behind Lucerne.

"I came this way to avoid the city," I said. "I wanted to grab some food before heading out."

"Heading out? Where?" Lucerne asked.

"I plan to follow the train tracks to the next town." I tried to sound convincing, but my voice came out hollow.

"Yeah, that sounds like a great plan," Deon said. "Why don't you stop by and see your mom on the way. I bet she can make some magic cookies for you."

"Just be careful," Lucerne stressed. "It's not easy out there alone."

"I know a ranger." I turned toward the house. "He said he would help me."

"A ranger? Really? Here? Where is he?" Lucerne took a step closer.

"He's just inside the house. He's probably watching us right now."

"Sounds like a trap to me," Deon said, moving farther out into the street.

I called to the house for Tennyson to come out, but he didn't appear. Lucerne was still holding the cat tightly and I walked over and tried to pry it out of her arms. She pushed me back at first, but then gave up. I held the cat up in the air and peered into its eyes.

"You belong to Tennyson, don't you? Don't you? Hey ranger, I found your cat," I called out.

"Like I said, a real freak," Deon said.

The door opened and Tennyson stepped out. He walked over and took his cat. He looked it over in his hands, propped up in the sky, turning it this way and that. It didn't appear to have been harmed. It still had two eyes, but one ear was torn a little, something that might have happened a long time ago.

Lucerne and Deon watched, both frozen in place.

"I'm Tennyson. And this is my cat," he finally said.

"You're a ranger?" Lucerne asked. "You don't look like much of a ranger."

"Easy, now. I'm retired."

"Oh," she said and produced a weak smile.

"Care for some lunch? I have some fish on the stove. I was going to share the rest with Lewis, but now that you're here, you're welcome to join us."

I followed him inside the house, leaving the door open. When neither Lucerne nor Deon came in, I glanced out the window. They were standing by the house and talking in low voices. After some time, they crept up the stairs. They glanced inside the doorway, but continued to whisper together without coming in.

Tennyson prepared fish for them and brought it into the living room and placed two plates on the floor. We went back to relaxing by the window.

"Are you the only ones here? How do we know if you're alone?" Lucerne called through the doorway.

"We're alone, except for my cat. You scared of cats?" Tennyson asked.

She popped her head inside and scowled at him. A moment later Deon charged into the room and plopped down on a pillow. He picked up a plate and began devouring the fish. After taking a few bites, he looked around. Lucerne followed, picking up a plate. Then she sat down and dug in.

I felt around for the vase by the wall. Once I was sure of its position, I leaned back, putting my hands behind my head the way I'd seen Tennyson do.

"You still haven't answered my question. Why'd you throw me out?" I asked.

"Magic scares people," Tennyson said before they could answer. "That's why science took over the world and magic nearly disappeared. People don't trust what they don't understand. And they definitely don't like what they can't control. Right now, Lewis, magic gives you an edge over everyone in this room. And that puts us all at risk."

"But I wouldn't hurt anyone," I whimpered.

"What's this all about? What magic?" Deon asked, sounding more alarmed than ever.

I pointed towards the vacancy where the vase was residing. He leaned over and swept his hand along the base of the wall to see if he could figure out what I had been playing with. Suddenly he knocked the vase over. And then he lurched back. Then he tried again. He reached down on the floor and searched around until he discovered the location of the vase. This time he flinched, but didn't recoil when he touched it. It was comical to watch.

"This is weird," Lucerne said. "I don't like it."

"Just relax, would you," I howled. "It's not going to hurt you. It's just a stupid old flower vase."

"But why can't we see it?" Deon asked.

"I'm still trying to figure out why we can see the cat," I said. I looked at Tennyson for help.

"I think I know," he replied. "Let's try an experiment."

He went into the kitchen and tugged open an old drawer. After digging around inside for a while and making enough noise to scare the cat, which ran outside, he grabbed a few items and returned to the living room. Then he sat down next to me, back against the wall. On the floor in front of us he placed a giant fork and two tablespoons. Deon and Lucerne leaned in closer to watch.

"This first one, the fork, don't make that disappear. We'll use that to control the experiment," he explained. "This second one, the spoon, I want you to make that vanish."

It only took a second to grant his wish. Lucerne edged back as soon as the spoon disappeared. Deon however reached down and felt around on the floor with his hand until his fingers bumped into it. He carefully moved his index finger around the spoon, feeling out its shape and tracing the pattern in the dust. We could clearly see the outline of the spoon, although it wasn't visible.

"Great. Now here's my theory," Tennyson said. "He's moving matter through time but not through space."

I waited a while, hoping the idea would sink in, but it never did. I threw him a questioning glance.

"Time and space. What's the difference?" Lucerne asked.

"You see, the spoon is still right here," Tennyson said, pointing at the pattern on the floor. "But it's not here right now. It's here tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. I don't know when."

"How are you doing that?" Deon asked and I shrugged my shoulders.

"Think of time and light as being part of the same equation," Tennyson said. "The light right now is not showing us the spoon, because the spoon is reflecting back the light shining on it tomorrow. And that light isn't here right now. That light is reflecting off the spoon tomorrow. So what we're seeing right now is the light reflecting off the place where the spoon should be, which is the floor, but not the spoon itself."

I was silent for a long time. When I looked closer, it appeared there might be something of a shadow in the shape of a spoon on the floor. It made sense in a crazy sort of way, yet it was clear by the look on Lucerne's face that she wasn't ready to accept this could be happening. Deon appeared a lot more open to the idea.

"So does that mean if we look here tomorrow, we'll see the spoon?" Lucerne asked.

"Probably. But I can't say exactly what time he sent it to."

"It explains why we can see the cat," I pointed out.

"And why the chopstick was there this morning," Deon confirmed.

Tennyson looked at me and pointed at the third utensil, the remaining tablespoon.

"Now, this time, I want you to make this one disappear. But see if you can send it to another place as well as another time."

"How am I supposed to do that?" I asked. "I don't even know what I'm doing."

"Think about it in terms of variables. X is time and Y is space," he said and scratched a large X and Y on the floor in the dust near the spoon.

"Yeah?" I pretended to follow along, although math had never been my strong point.

"First, pick an X. Then pick a Y. But for testing purposes, try to think of a time about 5 minutes from now so we don't have to wait until tomorrow to figure this thing out."

He drew a clock next to the X and a house next to the Y.

I looked at the spoon and concentrated. First, I thought, "Five minutes." Then I thought, "On the windowsill." Once I'd gotten a picture of a clock and the windowsill firmly placed side by side in my mind, I nodded toward the spoon as if I were dumping the images out on the floor.

The spoon vanished. I put my hand down and it was gone. I mean, it hadn't simply turned invisible this time. It had really disappeared. Deon, Lucerne, and Tennyson also put their fingers down on the floor, leaving prints in the dust where the spoon should have been.

"Five minutes," I said. "Give it five minutes."

We waited for the time to pass. And we waited. Five minutes stretched into forever. The sound of the breeze flowing in through the window, the cat outside wanting to come in, and other more distant noises floated toward us, layer upon layer. I listened and let my mind drift, until I had the sudden sensation that something felt different about the room, as if it were a little fuller than before. I looked over at the windowsill and the spoon was sitting right there, shining in the sunlight. I pointed at it.

"Look!" Deon said and jumped up and ran over to the window to check out the spoon.

He held it up for everyone to see. He even bent it in half and then back again, proving it was solid. It was the same spoon, we were certain.

The room was quiet as the reality of what had just happened sank it. Then all eyes turned on me. I looked over at Tennyson for support.

"That's good. You were right about that," I said. "But you still haven't explained why I can do this."

"Magic," he responded.

"What do you mean?"

"When I can't explain something, I call it magic," he said. "There may be a logical, scientific reason why Lewis can move objects through time and space, but whatever it is, I've got no clue. So let's just call it magic."

"Where can I get me some of that?" Deon asked. He got up to walk around as if he was looking for more clues, eye-balling me from different angles.

I felt uncomfortable with so many eyes on me. I'd never been the center of attention before. Just this morning, I'd been kicked out, half-expecting to die of starvation in the middle of nowhere. It was an unexpected turn of events, not knowing one minute where I'd eat and then the next being thrust into the middle of the universe.

I decided to test my newfound skill some more. I glanced at a broken chair by the doorway to the kitchen. And then it was gone. Deon, who had been resting a hand on the chair, nearly fell over.

"Hey, that's not funny!" he yelled. "Stop it."

The others laughed, but when Tennyson picked up a glass of water, I couldn't prevent myself from dismissing it as well. I not only made the glass vanish, but also moved it through both time and space, just like I had with the chair. The water, however, merely disappeared from view. Tennyson was still trying to drink when he noticed his hand was empty and something was flowing down the front of his shirt. He nearly choked, shooting invisible liquid from his nose.

"Slow down, kid," he said, shaking his head, "before you scare everyone away."

He was right. It was freaking them all out. Something had changed in the air, a shiver running down my arms, even with the warm sunlight coming in through the window. Tennyson bent down on one knee and looked directly in my eyes.

"Instead of making things disappear, think about making things remain visible," he suggested. "That should save you years of loneliness."

I got his point immediately. I scanned the room and wished things would remain the same. I took the time to focus on every object, even the walls and the floor and the ceiling, wishing they would stay forever just as they were. Then I focused on Deon and Tennyson, and finally, Lucerne. They looked back at me in frigid anticipation. I wished with all my energy that I would always have these close friends around me.

"What're you doing?" Lucerne asked in a childlike whisper.

"I'm wishing you will never leave me," I said.

The room had become unusually calm. Eventually, with the quiet, the cat ventured in through the front door and meowed at Tennyson's feet. He went into the kitchen where he'd left some fishtails on a plate and dished out one and gave it to the cat.

"Where did you get the fish?" I asked.

"There's a river just up the road. If you want, we can catch some tomorrow."

"That would be cool," Deon said.

"We need to get back," Lucerne reminded him. "We should put some vegetables in our bags and return to the base before Amelia and King start to worry."

"We'll help you," Tennyson said. "That way you can carry home more than you came for. I know if I were them, I'd be concerned about the time you've wasted here."

"It wasn't a waste of time," Lucerne said. "We're happy to see Lewis again. And now that we've met you, we know he'll be OK."

I sighed with relief, feeling a lot less like a monster. We ran around and gathered enough vegetables to fill their backpacks. And then Tennyson and I said goodbye to Deon and Lucerne. They agreed to return as soon as possible, but when they disappeared around the bend in the road I started to miss them, wondering how long it would be before we'd meet again.

# Part Three

#  Relocation

I was walking through a graveyard in the middle of the night. Under the eerie glow of the moonlight the gravestones I passed looked bleak and twisted, and although some of the graves had fresh flowers in front of them, the petals on those flowers appeared dark and oily as if a poisonous residue of the worst kind was seeping out of them.

The earth was still soft over some of the graves where new bodies had been put to rest. I walked carefully past these plots, where the grass wasn't growing, and as I advanced I read the names on the gravestones, the names of the people who now called this eternal resting place their final home.

I didn't exactly understand where I was or how I'd gotten here. This made me think this was a dream, yet I felt hungry and tired and all of those things I'd never expected to feel in a dream. I stopped at one particular headstone to ponder for a while after reading the name and date chiseled there. The letters showed signs of being worn over time, which suggested that this grave was older than the others. The name sounded familiar.

JONATHAN BRIGHAM TENNYSON

1912 – 1984

The last time I'd checked with Amelia, the date was around 2143 FE, which meant Future Earth. That was the date after the time loop, not the date on the old earth, the one that was repeating the same day over and over. If this wasn't a dream, I'd somehow been deposited in the past and this thought sent a chill through my body in the sweltering night.

Next to the graveyard was an old church. By the church was a shed, probably for tools, and maybe where the grave-keeper sat when he had nothing to do. The shed looked familiar. Take the roof off and add about a hundred years of disrepair to it and it was an exact copy of the entrance to the base where Lucerne and Deon stayed.

Across graveyard I saw a figure, silent as the moon, yet it wasn't a corpse or a reanimated body, but someone like myself who was alive and breathing. Bent down in the shadows over a headstone was a man dressed in white and I knew I had seen him somewhere before. In his hand he held a white cane, matching perfectly the white in his beard and hair. As I watched, his back shuddered, as if he were weeping. I wanted to see which grave he was standing before and I crept a little closer. Just then, he turned to face me. Before speaking, he took out a white silk cloth and dabbed it around his bloodshot eyes.

"You!" he yelled without warning, raising his cane up above his head and advancing in my direction.

"Wait," I said and hunched down. "I want to talk to you."

Just when he was about to hit me with his cane I made it disappear. He paused mid-stride, one foot planted firmly on the ground and the other in the air. Only his eyes were moving, frantically looking back and forth between me and his empty hand. Then he put his foot down. I put my hands up to show him I had peaceful intentions.

"I know what happened to you," I said. "I understand how much pain you must feel."

He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a gadget of some kind, which he pointed directly at me.

"How are you changing time? Who gave you access to my Worm Box?" He spit out the words as he stabbed at my face with his device, pushing buttons, but nothing happened.

"I know who you are," I said calmly. "I also know what you've done."

He growled deeply, like a disturbed animal, and then pressed another button on the box.

Suddenly the whole church behind us started to vibrate. The windows shattered into millions of pieces and the glass flew outward in every direction. A moment later the entire building exploded. Stones and mortar came unstuck and flew at us. They hit the little shed and the roof crashed inward. The sound of heavy projectiles rushing through the air was deafening. And just when everything was about to come hurtling down on top of us, the old man pushed a button and disappeared. Following suit, I closed my eyes and vanished into nothingness.

I woke up in Tennyson's house. Things were starting to make sense. This wasn't the first time I'd met him, that strange man they call Dr. Tarkentower, and I was pretty sure it wouldn't be the last.

I wandered into the kitchen where Tennyson was throwing together breakfast. We hardly spoke as we prepared to eat.

Tennyson was well adapted to living off the land. Like a true ranger, he knew how to take care of himself far away from the conveniences of civilization. He was hardly in danger of going hungry like I had been when I left the base. Yet for a long time now only his cat had kept him company and he appeared a little unsteady as he performed his daily routines with me hovering over his shoulder.

I stepped back and gave him some space to work. Still, I kept my eyes fixed on everything he did, following and memorizing every action he took, in case I ever found myself on my own. Even that seemed to bother him a little, yet he never said anything about it.

"You know, it's harder for me to move water than anything else," I said as we stuffed our faces.

"Water is one of the most basic elements in nature, along with earth, wind and fire. Have you tried moving any soil?"

I got up off the floor and stepped over to the window and looked down at a spot of earth in the yard. I willed it away to a place across the street, but nothing happened. I tried really hard, straining a part of my brain that I didn't fully understand, and sweat broke out on my brow. Slowly, the dirt moved, as if the wind were pushing it along the ground, and it ended up where I wanted it to go, but it never really disappeared.

"It seems like maybe I can move the four basic elements if I really knock myself out. But it sure gives me a headache."

"There's got to be a way we can use this," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"I've never met anyone like you before, Lewis. There have been rumors of people with unusual abilities on this future earth, but the scientists here are so stubborn they won't release any data. Talking to them about magic is like trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat."

"But why did this happen to me?"

"I don't know the answer to that. Has anything unusual happened to you?"

"You must be joking. What's normal these days?"

"I recall feeling disoriented when I first came through a Star Burn. And extremely hungry. But that passed eventually. You should be over that by now. I'm talking about something exceptionally unusual. Is there anything off the charts?"

"I ran into some of that blue crystal stuff. And at night, sometimes my skin glows blue. Is that what you'd call unusual?"

"In most cased, upon contact blue crystal turns people into monsters. And if they already are monsters, it makes them even worse. But you're different for some reason."

"Will I become a monster, eventually? I mean, will that stuff transform me into something horrific? Maybe it just works more slowly on me."

"I don't think so. I've met a lot of people bent on destruction and I could tell from the moment I met you that you had something really good to offer to the world."

"Really? I thought you were going to call the police. I broke your window, remember?" I said and he laughed.

"You've familiar with the legend of Tarkentower, right?" he asked.

"Sure, I was just talking to him."

"Funny," he said and continued as if I'd only just made a joke. "I doubt he knows what his time machine is doing right now to the people stuck inside the loop. Or possibly he just doesn't care. It's turning most everyone into monsters, monsters which could someday be transported here. They are a serious threat to this future he created."

"I can't make them all disappear, can I?" I said and looked down at my empty plate. The knife in my hand suddenly seemed really heavy. I let go of it and it dropped on the floor.

"We'll find a way, Lewis. There's got to be a way. Just stick with me and we'll figure this out together."

Later in the morning we walked over to the river and he taught me how to catch a fish. We dug up worms in the soft mud on the riverside and put them squirming onto hooks and then cast them into the water to drown. It would have been kinder if we'd crucified them. But we needed something to eat. I settled for catching a fish over sympathy for a worm.

We were waiting for a bite when I nodded off. A while later I glanced up and saw something strange floating closer, just beyond where we'd cast our lines. It looked like a leather jacket and I got the distinct feeling I'd seen it somewhere before. It might have been King's old jacket from the war, but what it was doing here, right now, I didn't know.

"Do you see that?" I asked.

"The jacket?"

"It looks like it's moving."

Tennyson picked up a rock and threw it at the jacket. The rock landed squarely in the middle and the jacket sank below the water. When a body failed to appear, we went back to tending to our fishing lines.

"Do you think you'll ever rejoin the rangers?" I asked.

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"I still have doubts."

"What do you mean?"

"Here we are, residing somewhere along a new future in time with a great opportunity to make the world a better place. Yet it feels like we're making the same old mistakes. I don't think people will ever learn."

"I follow you there," I said. "It's like we're stuck on a road where every exit leads to a worse scenario. And if we stay on the road, we'll end up crashing just the same."

"Sometimes you surprise me," he said. "Are you sure you're not a lot older than you look?"

I laughed. "Who knows. Maybe today's my sixteenth birthday."

"Well, happy birthday then, even if it's not."

"Do you really think we can change the world?"

"Yes and no," he said, without committing either way.

"It seems like the only choice we have is to figure out where Tarkentower is hiding."

"Maybe..."

I thought for a while before responding. It was time to take a chance. "I think I've met him before. A couple of times."

"Where?" he asked, sitting up.

"I have these dreams. Only they don't feel like dreams. They feel real, just as real as I feel right now talking to you. I think Tarkentower is aware of my presence here and he's preparing to stop me. I might be a threat to him."

"Are you certain?"

"Well, he hasn't figured out what to do about me yet. He doesn't fully understand why I'm here."

"Why are you here?"

"I don't know. Like you said, I'm different. I now understand that for the first time. I have a gift. I have to try and do something."

He kicked his heel into the ground a few times and sent a small shower of earth rolling down the riverbank into the water. Then he held his breath for a moment before letting it out slowly.

"I've been a fool for trying to hide here, for ignoring the problems of the world," he said at last.

"Life is but a dream..." I murmured.

"What?"

"It's a song. About a river."

He scowled even more deeply. "It would take a child to point out my own demise."

"Out there, that's where the answers are," I said, waving my hand at the world. "We need to keep moving if we want to get anywhere."

"Damn this life," he said, and then noticed I was scowling too. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know. Something's changed. I don't usually talk like this."

"You're just growing up, Lewis. It tends to happen to people."

"This is grown up?" I asked. "It's seriously messing with my brain."

He laughed. "Wait till you get to old, like me."

"Yeah, you are old," I said and we both laughed.

"You know, with all this serious talk, we need to cut loose a little. Let's get out of this neck of the woods and go have a little fun. Come with me. I have something I want to show you."

We hiked back to the house and he led me into the backyard, where we hung up our catch of the day. We had three healthy-looking river trout that would keep us fed for a couple days. And with winter approaching, the food would stay safe outside for a long time in the cold.

Tennyson's cat showed up and pawed the air as water dripped down from the fish. The cat licked its fur where water had landed on its paw and then searched our eyes for help.

"What's your cat's name?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Strange name. Seriously, what do you call it?"

"I never got around to naming him. We don't talk much."

I shook my head. "Old age is right."

He took me to the far end of the backyard where there stood an old shed surrounded by tall weeds. He hacked away at the weeds by the door with a sickle and then pulled a key out of his pocket and opened a rusty lock in the door. The door screamed in agony, the hinges nearly stuck in place, as we both pulled on the handle. It took several attempts before we could get the door open wide enough to walk inside the shed.

My eyes adjusted slowly. Then I noticed something big and black in the middle of the floor. Tennyson grabbed a tarp and gently rolled it up. Underneath was a motorcycle. And from what I could see, it was in mint condition. I walked around it and shook my head in surprise.

"I never turned her in after I quit the rangers," he explained.

"Can I try it?"

"Well, I can give you a ride, if that's what you mean."

He pushed the bike fully upright, pumped the kickstand back with his boot, and we wheeled it out into the yard. Tennyson went back into the shed to grab something. While waiting, I ran my eyes over every detail, wondering how it worked. The motorcycle was covered from end to end with bright chrome. It had a black leather seat and rested on thick meaty treads.

When he came out, he handed me a helmet. I went around to the other side of the bike and we rolled it out into the street. It only took a second to get it going. And it was loud. Birds hiding in the trees by the river took flight and flew in opposite directions.

"Climb on back," he yelled above the sound of the muffler.

I found a place to put my foot, grabbed his shoulder, and swung my leg over the seat, landing a little roughly.

"Hey, easy there!" the ranger within him said, his voice now sounding a lot more like someone who owned the road.

We took off slowly, gliding down the street, until we came to an intersection. Then he pointed the bike away from the city and opened it up wide.

It felt like flying. I put my hands out like a bird and within moments was convinced nothing in the world could ever hurt me. The sense of freedom was beyond compare.

We worked our way back and forth, going up and down long country roads stretching between the city and the mountains. I couldn't believe how fast we covered so much ground. After about an hour of bliss, he slowed the bike and pulled it over to the side of the road and shut it off.

Up ahead someone was coming our way. They were walking slowly. We waited in anticipation to find out who they were. When they got closer I could make out their faces. I could hardly hold back my excitement.

"Friends of yours?" Tennyson asked.

"I think that's King in the front!"

Deon looked bad. He had red welts on his arms and was having trouble walking. Lucerne was holding up much better, but her clothes were smeared with dirt and torn in places. King held a shotgun in his hands and was pointing it down the road in our direction. When they reached us, he looked relieved. He put the butt of the gun on the ground and held on to the barrel. Tennyson climbed off the motorcycle and shook his hand.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Trackers," Lucerne said. "They followed us to the base, right after we left you. We thought we had covered our tracks, but they fooled us. Once they discovered where the stairs were, they pinned Deon and me down on the ground and made us yell for King and Amelia to come out."

King kept his eyes on the road and remained silent as we talked. Deon shifted his weight off his sore leg and looked for a place to sit down.

"Did they?" I asked.

"I thought something was off right away," King said in a rusty voice. "They'd never waited for us outside before. I came out shooting. That was all the prompting the trackers needed. They took off down the road."

"Do you know where they came from?" Tennyson asked.

"I might have an idea about that," King said. "I've seen their kind before."

Tennyson pulled a map out of a compartment on the motorcycle. "Here, take a look," he said, pointing. "Show me where."

King scanned the map, running his finger along the lines, until he found the location of the base. Then he swung his finger in an arc and stopped on another spot.

Lucerne tried to glance over his shoulder. Deon remained a few paces away, all curiosity gone. He looked both run over and beat up at the same time.

"That's where I think they were heading," King said.

"Interesting," Tennyson said. "You might be right."

"This is some map," King said. "It's got more detail than any map I've seen of this region. Where did you get it?"

"Rangers have access to a lot of things."

"So you're a ranger, like these kids told me?"

"Ex-ranger. Maybe you've met me before." He took off his helmet and lifted his sunglasses. "The name's Tennyson."

"We thought you'd kicked the bucket," King exclaimed. "Nobody's heard from you in a while. They said you disappeared some years ago. I see you've still got your bike. What happened?"

"I just took a different turn in life. Retired, that's all. I guess in retrospect it might have been better if I'd told someone, but I just wanted to be left alone."

"I can understand that."

I asked. "Why were you walking this way?"

"After the ambush," Lucerne said, "we told them we'd found you living with a ranger. It didn't take much to convinced King to look for you. We're desperate now without a safe place to live. The trackers could come back any time."

"That's one of the problems with the current state of affairs," King pointed out. "You rangers always know where to find us. But if ever we need anything, how are we supposed to find you?"

"Good point. But since I'm retired, you'll have to take that up with the ranger guild. Until then, we'd better get back to your base and have you clear out. Those roughnecks will certainly plan another attack. And this time they'll come prepared. I don't think you really scared them away with just a shotgun."

"It'll be a shame to leave everything behind," King said. "I've been putting together a nice collection of cooking utensils and all. Any chance we could salvage some of those things?"

"Possibly," Tennyson said. "We'll move the more important items to a safer location today. The bulk of it, though, you're going to have to kiss that stuff goodbye for a while, at least until things settle down. How many of you are there?"

"Only one more," King said. "Amelia. We run a tight little crew in this region."

"You left her alone? We'd better move fast," he said and threw his leg over the motorcycle, landing with a spring. He turned the key and it roared to life.

"Can you give Deon a ride?" I yelled into his ear. "I think we can walk."

"You mean I can try it?" Deon asked.

"Yeah, help him up," Tennyson shouted back.

We gave him a hand climbing on the motorcycle. Then Tennyson took off down the road and we started walking back to the base. No one spoke at first and we marched in steady time.

"The kids tell me you're doing fine," King said without looking at me. "After getting a little sleep, I felt guilt about throwing you out."

"No hard feelings," I reassured him. "I know I must have shaken you guys up."

"So, tell me, can you really do it?"

"I can do it, but it's all under control now," I said. "You don't have to worry about me."

"You see," he went on, "the tricks you can do, a lot of folks around here would be scared to hole up with someone like that. They believe that kind of stuff runs against the natural order of things."

"What do you mean?"

"Take that blue crystal, for example. That stuff can really mess people up, big time. Anyone who can handle it isn't normal."

"But why?" I asked.

"No one knows for sure. I wouldn't be surprised if aliens brought it here. You aren't an alien, are you?" he said and glanced at me.

"No," I said. "I don't know what I am."

"He's just different, that's all," Lucerne said and put her arm around me. "I like different."

I almost fell over. Her skin was so soft. My heart was pounding so hard it nearly exploded out of my stomach. I brushed her arm away and fought back a spell of dizziness. She looked at me like she was offended.

"Sorry," I said. "I'm just worried I'll hurt you."

"I don't think you ever could hurt me."

I smiled at her. Her confidence was reassuring.

"We'd better hurry," King said and picked up the pace.

When we arrived at the base, they were waiting for us there. Deon had introduced Tennyson to Amelia and she'd already taken to the idea of moving to a safer location. She seemed relieved when she saw me and ran over to give me a hug. "You look like you're starving. Where have you been sleeping?"

"I can take care of myself," I said with indifference, then gave in and hugged her in return.

We moved everything that King wanted to salvage up the stairs and out into the open. Backpacks, canisters of food, notebooks from Amelia's desk, candles, and repair kits for our clothes, among other smaller things, were put in a pile next to the motorcycle. Less important things were put in a pile near the shed. Once we had it all sorted out and ready to go, Tennyson took one more look at the two piles and then cut our supplies down in size.

"There's just too much to move safely over a long distance in a hurry. Put the extra stuff back downstairs. If you ever need it, you can come back later."

While they were packing up the backpacks, I wandered out into the field behind the shed. I kicked at rocks and weeds until I found the remnants of one of the walls of the old stone church. From there, walking out farther, I came across headstones toppled over long ago and hidden below the tall grass.

"What are you looking for?" Lucerne asked, coming up behind me.

I pointed to the marker and she bent down to read it.

JONATHAN BRIGHAM TENNYSON

1912 – 1984

When she stood up again, I slid my arm around her and pulled her close. Her lips were glistening in the sunlight and she closed her eyes and leaned in for a kiss. We parted when Tennyson stepped out from the other side of the shed.

"It's right here," I said, pointing toward the grave marker at our feet.

He came over to see what we'd found. King and Amelia followed, and Deon came after them, limping slowly. Tennyson knelt down and cleared the weeds away so he could read the headstone clearly. Then he looked up at the sky and sighed. We remained silent, waiting for him to find peace. When an eternity had passed he spoke again.

"I finally know where my father rests," he said. "At least he wasn't doomed to suffer in the old world, like so many are doing right now."

"There's one more thing you should see before you go." I led them across the rubble in the graveyard to another grave marker:

MARTHA GRACE TARKENTOWER

1937 – 2012

"Who was she?" Deon asked.

"Tarkentower's wife," I explained.

"I didn't know this was here," Amelia exclaimed. "We've been here for so long and one of the clues about this future earth has been right at our feet. I should have looked at these stones more closely while I had the chance. I guess I tend to stay underground too much these days."

"That date looks familiar," Tennyson said. "Don't most estimates point toward 2016 as the startup year of Tarkentower's time machine?"

Amelia nodded.

"I think that's what set him off," I said. "I think his wife died and it drove him crazy. That's why he put the whole time machine concept into motion. He comes back here sometimes to visit her."

"How do you know that?" Amelia asked.

"I've seen him here before. But it wasn't until now that I realized what was going on."

King said, "This is all very interesting, but we have a lot of traveling to do before the sun goes down."

We walked back to the motorcycle. Amelia opened up a notebook and sketched a duplicate of the headstones on an empty page. Then she closed it and put it away.

King locked the door at the bottom of the stairs and came up top. We hefted our backpacks and adjusted the straps. Before we left, King walked over to the shed and leaned against the side for a moment as if trying to catch his breath. I was about to ask him if he was alright when he motioned for us to join him. Then I heard a cracking sound. The shed started to give way and we all pushed together until it fell over. It crashed down on the stairs, sealing the entrance from intruders.

"If anyone wants to get down there now, they're going to have to break their backs to do it," King said as he wiped his hands on his pants.

"I like the way you think," Tennyson said, patting him on the back.

"Let's go," King said. "Get ready to march."

"Keep your eyes open for trouble," Tennyson reminded us, looking at the road.

He gunned the motorcycle to life and turned it in the right direction. Deon climbed on back, holding a package under one arm, and they took off. We followed on foot. The motorcycle disappeared on the horizon and was gone a while. When it arrived back at our location, we helped Amelia climb on back. Then Tennyson came back again for King, but he refused to get on.

"Take the kids first," he said, the gun on his shoulder. "I'll cover our tracks and be sure we aren't followed."

Lucerne went next and then it was my turn. Tennyson dropped me off at his house and left to pick up King. Not much later, the pair returned. King hopped off the back like he was twenty years younger.

They came inside and Tennyson showed him the kitchen. We'd already brought in some of our food supplies taken from the base, complimenting what Tennyson had in store. Deon settled into the one comfortable chair in the living room, easing the pressure off his bad leg. Lucerne sat on a pillow by the window. I stood by the window and looked out at the approaching dark. A chilly air pass through the house as the sun went down.

After dinner was prepared, we ate quickly. Then Amelia grabbed one of her notebooks and sat down on a pillow. She was something of a scientist and a teacher and a historian and a doctor all rolled into one, with a never-ending flood of questions right on the tip of her pencil. While she wrote, I picked up one of her other notebooks and glanced inside. It was a collection of observations, documenting and expounding on the possibilities of life on this future earth. When we'd left the base, she'd insisted on bringing as many of her notebooks with her as we could carry.

"Lewis, can you repeat the demonstration you gave Tennyson? The one with the utensils?" she asked. "I'd like to record the details of the experiment."

I liked the way she asked and I went through the routine again, feeling something like a monkey in a circus, but I did my best to put on a good show. I made the silverware disappear and reappear again at command.

She wrote fast, faster than I'd ever seen anyone write, marking down the date and time and important details of each step. King was somewhat curious at first, but once he'd seen me perform the trick a time or two, he lost interest and went out into the backyard. Deon and Lucerne followed after him. It smelled like they had a small fire going and I could hear them laughing. Tennyson stayed inside, watching me closely, but didn't say a word. When we finished, I felt a little exhausted and had thoughts about finding a place to curl up and sleep. Performing magic like this was hard work.

Amelia spoke slowly, as if thinking it through. "I agree with the theory about what you are doing, physically speaking, when it comes down to moving objects through time and space. But I'm not yet ready to call it magic. I think we need to get you to someone who can determine more specifically what's going on inside you. I sincerely hope that somehow you can use this gift to make this future earth a better place."

"You mean you want to lock him up in a lab with a team of scientists who are going to cut him into little pieces while they look for answers?" Tennyson asked.

"Of course not!" she said in shock. "What makes you think I'd do something like that?"

"You've never seen what they do to people like Lewis. I have."

"I know a man in the Kingdom," she said, "someone we can trust, someone who can help Lewis understand his gift a lot more than we can, living out here on the fringe like we do. They have entire libraries full of books about magic, more than my little notebooks can compete with."

"You don't feel like magic is something dangerous?" I asked.

"The way you do it, no, I don't. But let's say my vote isn't in yet," she responded. "We need more information."

Tennyson got up and walked over to the window and took a look out into the dark. He crossed his arms. I sat on the floor and waited for someone to speak. Candlelight danced on the walls, softly creating shadows in the room and filling the air with the fresh scent of leaves melted in wax. My head grew heavy and I nodded off a time or two.

"The Kingdom is a place I swore I'd never go back to," he said at last.

I woke up with a start. "What is the Kingdom?"

"What happened to you there?" Amelia asked him, ignoring me. "I've heard the stories. You were involved in something big. And then you just vanished."

He turned and sat down on the window sill, the black night behind him almost devouring his shoulders within the window frame. A strange darkness cloaked his face. Deon and Lucerne and King returned and sat down on the floor and waited for someone to speak. I was slowly falling asleep once more but I wanted to hear what he had to say and I forced myself to sit up and pay attention.

He took his time, handing out each word carefully. "Rangers had been reporting back to the Kingdom for years about some kind of activity going on at the edge of the northern uninhabitable region. Since we had little clue about what was going on in that zone, I put forward the proposal to the Council to send out a team to collect more information. Observe and report back, nothing more, that's all I wanted. Yet members of the Council thought it unwise to enter a place yet unmapped and they blocked my proposal. They preferred to dismiss the issue for reasons I still haven't figured out, although I have my theories."

"So what did you do? Did you try to enter the zone alone?" King asked. "That's what I would have done."

"No, although I'm sure a lot of people thought that's what happened at the time. I decided I'd had enough of being a puppet. It was time to move on. I retired. I hung up my hat and quit the rangers without notice. I moved out here to the edge of society where I've been living peacefully up until now."

The room was quiet for a long time. I looked around at everyone, their eyes glowing in the candlelight. I was ready to say something, but then Amelia spoke first.

"Whatever differences there were in the past between you and the Council, they will have to be put aside now, because this is a matter of urgency. I've got several books here full of important notes that need to be taken to the Kingdom and my findings need to be validated. First, the blue crystal is spreading, I'm sure of it. Second, it's having an unusual side-effect on people, such as the case with Lewis. There are more and more people here now every year, people who just want to live in peace and harmony with the natural order of things. But they are at risk. And finally, we now have proof that Tarkentower exists, that the stories about him might be true."

King said, "I say we skip the Council and the Kingdom and go straight to the heart of the matter. We enter the northern zone directly. Along with Lewis's help, and my shotgun, we set this world straight."

"The Kingdom is many days away from here," Tennyson objected. "And then the northern zone is much further than that. We already know Tarkentower is aware of Lewis's presence here. What length will he go to, if he wants to stop us?"

The debate continued to move around the room into the night as they considered plan after plan. I listened closely, along with Deon and Lucerne, yet no one asked me what I thought. I resented being ignored like a child.

Finally, I interrupted. "I've never heard of the Kingdom before. Tell me more about it."

"The Kingdom is the center of civilized life on this side of the planet," Amelia explained. "It's a giant city, but not a modern one. It's really unlike anything you've ever seen before, so different from the one sitting vacant next to us. It was built after people began moving into the future. We had to find ways to do things more efficiently, because traditional methods of generating energy are unavailable, for the most part. If you were to see it, you might think it's a really old city built in ancient times, but it's not. I haven't been there in years. I imagine by now it's really well organized."

"I hate to disappoint you," Tennyson said. "While there have been some improvements to the quality of life in the Kingdom, the Council has become useless. The last time I was there people were talking openly about how inactive our leaders are. Going to the Kingdom and appealing to the Council right now might be more trouble than it's worth."

"I can't speak for Deon and Lucerne," I said, "but I'm ready to get out of this place. I've been feeling this way for a long time. Something is calling to me, drawing me outward, something I can't explain. It's this feeling inside me, something like a voice, telling me that I am somewhat responsible for what has been happening to this world. I need to find some answers. I need to know if I can make a difference."

"I feel the same way," Lucerne chimed in. "Wherever Lewis goes, I'm staying with him."

"In the Kingdom you would make an excellent nominee for becoming a ranger," Tennyson said, nodding at her. "That is, if you can complete the required training."

"Really? You mean I could be a ranger someday?" she blurted out, jumping up off the floor. "Are you actually inviting me to join the guild?"

"Since I'm no longer an active part of the rangers, I can't do that. But I could point you in the right direction, once we get there."

"Then that's what should happen," Amelia instructed the room. "Give Lucerne a chance to apply for ranger training at the Academy. And at the same time, you can deliver my notebooks. There's a man there called Archer. Explain to him what's been going on and tell him you are a friend of mine. You can trust him. He'll take care of the rest. Is that OK with you, Lewis? Does your plan for exploring the world allow for a trip to the Kingdom?"

"We leave in the morning," I said without a second thought, feeling like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

"I'm going to stay here," King announced. "I'd like to take a look at the surrounding fields nearby and bottle up some seeds for the coming spring. I've got this idea about farming the land next year. This area looks like a good place to start."

"Since Deon's leg is injured, he's in no shape to travel," Tennyson said.

"He needs a qualified person to look after him, so I'll stay," Amelia said.

"Just don't forget to send me a postcard," Deon joked, but uncertainty was hanging on the edge of his voice.

The evening grew late and we picked out places to sleep for the night. It felt a little crowded with the six of us living so close together. There were small rooms upstairs for King and Amelia. Deon fell asleep in the comfortable chair.

The house was made of brick and had a stone fireplace, which Tennyson sat down in front of to warm his feet. It was a kickback to older times, one of those rare structures that could last a hundred years and still not show any sign of decay. The house felt safe.

I laid awake in one corner of the main bedroom holding Lucerne by my side. We kept each other warm. I closed my eyes and listened to her breathing and thought about tomorrow's journey and all the changes it might bring. Sounds outside arrived in muffled tones, sometimes sounds foreign and unwise, and other times sounds that mingled with my own inner voice, telling me I was a part of a world constantly growing all around me.

Mostly I listened to the sound of my own heart beating and then I kissed Lucerne gently and she sighed lightly like a whisper carried on the wind. She opened her eyes and smiled and told me to go back to sleep.

As the moon peaked in the sky, I thought I heard music. I rubbed my eyes and wandered out into the living room where Tennyson sat. His eyes were fixated on the fire and all expression had disappeared from his face. He held an old guitar in his hands and was strumming it softly and singing a strange tune.

I fell asleep by the window and dreamed late in the night of a place I'd once visited. This time I was home and my mother was in the kitchen cooking. The smell of fresh bread drifting toward me, and the sound of the baseball game on the TV as my father watched out in the living room and made remarks, play after play, these were the things that sat most well within me. Yet I knew they were not real, nothing I could find any tangible comfort in anymore, because they were just memories from the past.

Still singing by the fireplace, like a river lost and laughing, Tennyson sat with his guitar, turning out endless runes and melodies that made me long to discover a whole new world waiting just outside the door.

#  Across the Plains

Something woke me up. I heard the sound of the front door closing and then I heard a thud as something hit the ground. I got up and went to the front window and looked out. Tennyson was out in the street, splitting logs with an ax. The fire had gone out and the house was cold.

I woke the others up and we ate a thin breakfast. Tennyson had a sidecar for his motorcycle and he spent an hour attaching it and testing it out. When he finally came in to eat, he looked worn out and distracted, his face a field of wrinkles.

"Feels colder today," he said.

"Coffee?" King asked.

"Definitely."

King brought out a bag of ground coffee that he had been hoarding. He explained that he had roasted the beans over a fire and ground them by hand into a fine powder. He handed Tennyson a heavy cup of the stuff and the lines on the his face faded with each sip. I tried it as well, but didn't care for the bitterness.

Amelia also looked like she'd been up most of the night. She spent the early morning scribbling notes in her notebooks and tagging pages. She said she was trying to make copies of the most important parts in case the books were lost on the way to the Kingdom. How they could get lost, nobody wanted to explore that possibility. But they were her life's work. In the end, Tennyson took the notebooks and after weighing them by hand, handed back the heaviest ones. She began to object, but stopped short. He raised a hand and silenced her, clearly not in the mood to be questioned today.

"I can't exactly say how long we'll be gone," he said. "These things tend to have a mind of their own."

"Don't forget about me," Deon said. "When my leg is better, I'll follow you."

"We won't be easy to find," I said as I climbed on the motorcycle and landed behind Tennyson.

Lucerne sat down in the sidecar. "After I make ranger, I'll stop by and see you every chance I get."

"Watch out for my cat, will you, Deon?" Tennyson said. "I expect her to be alive and kicking when I return."

"No problem." He picked the cat up and held it in the air, looking into its eyes. "You gonna catch something today?"

The cat meowed a positive reply and we took off down the road. We moved away from the city, speeding across the land, past forests and fields, over river bridges and around lakes. I took it all in, holding my breath. The world beyond the city was much bigger than I'd expected. We rode for hours like this, until Tennyson pulled the motorcycle over and let us stretch our legs.

"How long will it take to get there?" I asked.

"Three days, if we can find gas. If we can't, a couple weeks," he said.

"What?" I asked. "Why do we need gas?"

"This beast don't run on steak and potatoes, not like you and I do," he said and tapped the side of the gas tank with his knuckles.

"How much have we got?" Lucerne asked.

"Probably enough for a day," he explained. "But don't worry. I know a place just up the road. There's an old timer there who runs a gas station and I'd like to shake his hand again, if he's still living above ground."

We got back on and I sat in the sidecar this time. The wind was in my face. I saw birds fly by as if they were racing us and I watched the tree-line weave in and out like an accordion player churning out some obscure rhythmic tune. The air smelled sweet, although it was cold. I let go of my senses and felt the hypnotic movement of the road luring me into a deep peaceful sleep. A moment later someone was waking me up.

"We're here. Time to fill up."

The gas station looked deserted. Tennyson parked the bike and went inside. When he came back out, he shook his head and walked around to the back of the station. We heard him kick something with his boot and then something fell over, accompanied by the sound of metal hitting metal. When he came around to the front again he was zipping up his pants.

"Funny how much things change when you've been gone a while," he mused more to himself than to either of us.

I looked at the fuel pump. The machine was a relic from the past, rusted and dirty, so much that I doubted it would ever work.

"How much does it cost?" I asked.

"Nothing. Everything's free today, so it seems. That is, if they have anything left."

He kicked a barrel with his foot and it echoed with a hollow ring. But when he tried to move it, something sloshed around inside. He opened the cap on the top of the barrel and looked in and then took a quick step back as fumes rose up into the air. The smell almost knocked me out.

"She'll get us through a couple days, if we don't spill any," he said. "Come over here and help me pick this thing up, both of you."

He put a funnel in the gas tank and we hefted the barrel up into the air. We tilted it down over the bike, watching in painful suspense as a dark liquid flowed into the funnel. It took a while. By the time we were ready to put the barrel down, my arms where screaming in agony. I rubbed my shoulders and winced.

"It looks like we might need to turn up the heat a little," he said, watching me cringe. "From now on, we do this ranger style. Every day, you'll work out until you get yourselves into better shape."

"I'm already pretty fit," Lucerne said.

"You might think you're fit, young ranger, but I doubt you'll be able to keep up with me. If we run into trouble, I'll need someone I can depend on. I'll train you. You train Lewis. No questions."

She smiled at that.

I was happy just to be moving. If they wanted to kill some time by exercising, I wouldn't stop them. But I hardly doubted I'd be able to keep up with either of them if we ran into trouble.

"Do you think we'll run into any trackers?" I asked.

"I'm pretty sure we will. I ran into you, didn't I?"

"What do you mean? We're not trackers."

"Sure you are. You look for new recruits after a Star Burn, don't you?"

"Yeah?" I asked, confused.

"I'll let you in on a secret, now that we're traveling together. Rangers work with all kinds of people. We have maps of all the major bases as well as some minor ones. We collect data on how many people there are in any given region, including who's new and who's gone off the map, who's fighting with who and for what, who's got leadership potential, and in cases like yours, who's got the makings of a ranger or unusual talent."

"How many bases are there?" Lucerne asked.

"Right now, there are seven major groups in the New Cargo region. Most are pretty peaceful. Some are even more passive than you, believing they should never harm animals. They don't eat any meat. Other groups, like the ones who attacked your base, they follow a more aggressive dogma, thinking they have a right to take over everything."

"You know who attacked us? You know where their base is and you didn't say anything?" she demanded.

"I'm pretty sure I know who they are. And I also know we don't have the kind of firepower we need to go up against them, not right now. Besides, they have a representative in the Council, just like you. Once we reach the Kingdom, you'll see firsthand how things work. Just wait and see. Then things will make a lot more sense. Fighting with weapons isn't the only way to get things done."

"I can take care of myself pretty well," she said.

"I'll second that," I added. "She's pretty good with those dead people."

"So you ran into a dead guy and lived to tell about it? OK, I'll admit, I'm impressed. Tell me what happened."

We spilled out the story of our encounter with the dead man and Tennyson listened without interruption. Then he looked over at me.

"This rock you grabbed and forced into his mouth, what color was it?"

"Blue," I said and dropped my head. "It was blue crystal."

"You lied to me!" Lucerne gasped. She took a step back, crossing her arms and glaring at me.

"I thought you'd freak out and leave me."

"But how can I ever trust you now, Lewis?" she asked in a pleading way. "How?"

"I was right, wasn't I?" I yelled. "You did abandon me, once you found out."

"Lewis," Tennyson said, holding a hand up. "There's something you need to understand. Safety is important to everyone, not just you. Others have a right to know when they're in danger."

I kicked the dirt, defeated. It seemed like I'd always be making mistakes with Lucerne. There had to be some way I could win her over once and forever. If only she'd look at it from my perspective.

"Right now," Tennyson continued, "our objective is to cross the wilderness without incident and reach the Kingdom. In order to do that, Lucerne, you're going to have to learn to live with this kid, like it or not. He may still have a few things he needs to work on, but don't we all?"

She kept silent, her eyes far away. She looked up at the sky and rolled her head around in a circle, taking in everything around us, looking everywhere but at me.

Inside, it hurt. It hurt a lot. I knew I could never harm her in any way, but how could I convince her of that?

"Listen, I'm really sorry," I said.

She walked over to the bike and climbed on the back without saying a word. At this moment, I hated the whole world more than anything. If I could have made it all disappear, I would have. But I knew something like that was useless at a time like this, because it would never win back Lucerne. All I could do was suffer in silence.

"One more thing I want to say before we get closer to the Kingdom," Tennyson went on. "It will go a lot better for us if we keep Lewis's gift a secret. Don't mention it to anybody, at least not until I get a feel for how people might react."

"Is it that serious?" I asked.

"You ever play cards, kid? It's all about the bluff. As soon as people know what's in your hand, they start chipping away at your advantage."

He took out one of Amelia's notebooks and leafed through the pages and stopped when he came across her notes on me. He folded the pages over and tore them out of the book. Then he put the notebook away and held the extra pages up in the air. They looked like they might fly out of his hand and disappear in the wind at any moment.

"Can you make these disappear?"

I took them in my hands and scanned them. I had no idea if it was the right thing to do, but I nodded. "When and where?"

"Do you know this sign?" He scratched the symbol for infinity in the paint on the side of the gas pump with his knife.

I nodded again. I fixed my eyes on the symbol and then I pictured myself holding onto the pages an eternity from now. In case something weird happened to time and the pages somehow returned, I'd be the first one to find them. In a flicker of a second they were gone.

"Good. And one more thing. Once we reach the Kingdom, don't do that anymore."

"Got it."

"Anyone hungry?" he asked.

"I am." Lucerne jumped off the bike.

She opened a compartment and pulled out three paper bags King had packed for us. Inside were sandwiches, oozing with toppings. They were a little smaller than I would have liked, but much more filling than breakfast had been.

Lucerne turned a shade softer after she finished eating and I found myself relaxing as well. King knew just the right medicine to keep us going. Tennyson put the cap back on the barrel of gas and tipped it over. He gave it a push with his boot and it rolled out of the way.

We headed west for the rest of the day. The road followed the northern rim of a giant lake and then it crossed over a river that fed the lake. Then it ran along the base of a mountain range out of which the river flowed.

The world stunned me on every level. I tried to capture each detail, as if I had a camera embedded in my memory. The color of the bark on various trees, the leaf patterns of plants along the road, and even the smell of the water mixed with dirt beneath the vegetation, it all came at me in a rush. I sat stunned, as if in a dream more vivid than life itself. I let my spirit soar, ebbing and flowing in the winds of the world.

In the evening, before the sun set, Tennyson pulled the motorcycle over to the side of the road. We helped him push it across a ditch and out into a field. We stopped in a clearing in the middle of a cluster of trees. There we took tree branches and laid them carefully along the exposed side of bike, hiding it from anyone who might be passing by on the road.

In one of the side-bags on the motorcycle was a tarp with a long rope wrapped around it. Lucerne and I took the rope and stretched it out between two trees in a place where the ground looked flat. Thick weeds padded the earth everywhere and I fathomed they might be good for sleeping on.

After Lucerne had tied her end of the rope, she came over and helped me tie mine. I didn't know much about tying knots. It wasn't a skill I had much confidence in acquiring, either. She showed me how to tuck the rope and pull it tight until the knot wouldn't budge. She made it look easy, but it made little sense to me. Then she untied the knot and handed the rope to me. I attempted to do what she had done but dropped my shoulders after the rope slid from the tree trunk and fell on the ground.

"Come on, Lewis, you've got to try," she said. "You're just not trying."

I felt nervous around her. She was her old self again, being friendly toward me, like nothing had ever happened, yet something didn't feel right between us. Maybe the problem was more with me than it was with her, but I wasn't sure. I really didn't know how to approach her. She showed me one more time how to handle the rope and I thought I was getting it, but then she sighed and untied the knot and made a new one for me and took a step back.

"Don't worry about it," she said. "It's not that important. You just need to learn how to focus your mind."

"I never thought tying a knot would be so important," I quipped.

"No, silly," she said and laughed. "Of course it isn't. It's just that most people find it easy."

I went over and inspected the knot in the rope around the tree. I took my time and untied it and retied it just like I'd seen her do. This time it was tight. I even leaned on the rope, showing how secure it was. Tennyson put down his knife and a piece of wood he was whittling to clap his hands. Lucerne took a playful bow.

We went back to building our camp for the night, pulling the tarp over the rope and stretching the corners out in all directions. We secured them to the ground with splintered tree branches that we pushed through holes in the corners of the tarp. This made the tarp into a tent shape with plenty of room for us to crawl under. Then we stretched another tarp out on the ground. This tarp provided us with something dry to sleep on. When we were finished, Tennyson inspected our work and nodded in approval.

"It's probably better not to light a fire tonight," he said. "We don't want anyone to know we are here. But it will get cold, I'll tell you that."

"Is it safe to sleep outside?" Lucerne asked. "I think we'd be better off in a solid structure of some kind."

"The safest place to be is the last place anyone would expect to find you. And this way, we can rise early in the morning and hit the road undetected."

With the cold moving in fast, we climbed under the tent and threw blankets over ourselves. I could hear Lucerne's rhythmic breathing close by and knew she'd fallen asleep fast. Sounds of the river, the gentle wind pushing the leaves in the trees, it all came to me in waves and swept me off into a world made up of endless dreams.

In the night I awoke to hear a slithering sound. It sounded like the wind was pushing the grass aside all around us, or maybe it was like the sound of water running across a field. In that instant I knew something was outside, surrounding us, searching around the edges of our shelter. Then the sound was gone. I listened intensely for what seemed like hours, without moving a muscle. But it had disappeared altogether into the dark. Finally, the sounds of the night took over again and I fell back to sleep.

#  The Attack

In the morning I crawled out of the tent, thirsty and hungry and cold. Our water bottles were empty. Tennyson opened a bag and pulled out some hardened bread and passed it around and then gave us a slice of onion to chew on. The bread sucked the moisture out of my mouth with every bite.

"Can we refill our bottles somewhere nearby?" I asked.

"Come with me," Tennyson said and motioned for us to follow. He grabbed a shallow pan from the bike and handed it to me. "There's something I want to show you."

We walked with him out of the trees and across the field, back to the road, and then we walked down the road, passing over the top of a hill and down the other side, until we came to a bridge. Once a raging river had thrived here, but now only a shallow stream seeped down from the mountains. The trickle of water passed below the bridge and spread out across the plain and disappeared into the ground.

He took us down below the bridge. Using the pan as a shovel, he dug some of the murky sediment up from the bottom of the stream, carefully keeping his boots and hands dry. Then he began to slosh the pan around, separating the heavier stones from the muck until he was able to dump some of the sediment out. He repeated the process again and again, reducing the collection in the pan to smaller and smaller particles.

When only a thin layer of fine black sand remained, I leaned in closer to take a look. In the bright sunlight I saw something shiny, something blue, blue crystal. It was mixed in with the black sediment. Lucerne took a quick step back from the edge of the water.

"There must be a lode of the stuff somewhere up above," he said and pointed with his chin toward the mountains. "It's being washed downstream and deposited into the field."

"I wonder if that explains where all the cows went," I said.

"What?" he asked.

"We were trying to figure out where all the cows have gone," Lucerne said. "Do you think they strayed somewhere around here?"

"If they had, you'd be seeing some mighty strange cows, indeed. After drinking this water, well, I can't even begin to imagine what they'd look like now."

"Look up ahead," Lucerne said, pointing.

Two tall figures had just come around the bend in the road. They stopped about fifty meters away and took up fighting stances. Although they carried weapons, neither made the effort to draw them yet. I think it was their menacing poses that made Tennyson yell, "Run!"

I lost no time considering why. Right on his tail, I head back over the hill and along the road toward the campsite where we'd spent the night.

The two stone warriors were not far behind us. They weren't advancing in a hurry, but they had bigger strides. They moved carefully, taking giant steps like animated statues that might fall over. However slowly they walked, though, they looked ready to fight.

We left the tent behind. In a hurry we wheeled the motorcycle across the field and over the ditch. By this time, our path forward was blocked. They had stopped directly ahead of us, occupying the whole road.

"Can you move them?" Tennyson asked.

It was a good idea, but I had my doubts. The basic elements such as stone and water were difficult for me to move, but it could be done. With every fiber in my body I focused my will and made them disappear. It was a gigantic effort and it left me feeling like a battery dried out and soon to be discarded.

Down the road, behind us, they appeared again, in the direction we had come from. That was the best I could do. I nearly passed out. The strain had almost rendered me almost senseless.

Without a moment of hesitation, the stone warriors turn around to face us and this time they drew their weapons, one with a curved sword and the other with a long pole. They chopped at the air in our direction. One of them stepped forward and shook the ground so hard that I nearly fell over.

"Get on the bike!" Tennyson commanded.

I scrambled to get on and then the motorcycle sprang to life. When I glanced back, the two stone warriors were already advancing in our direction. Tennyson throttled the bike and pointed it toward the hill and we sped away.

We drove the rest of the day full tilt, only stopping long enough to refill our water bottles in a small pool where it was safe to drink. Toward evening, Tennyson pulled the bike into a roadside diner, this one alive with customers. We got off and stretched our legs briefly before going inside.

No one paid much attention to us. Patrons drank and joked together, smashing their glasses down on the tables so hard that beer sloshed and spewed up in the air.

Tennyson motioned to the man behind the counter, urging him over. "Brother, we may have trouble coming this way."

"I thought you were dead," the man replied, all the while searching Tennyson's face for more information.

"You old fool, how have you been?" Tennyson asked and shook his hand.

"What sort of nonsense did you bring with you this time?"

"Two stone warriors," he explained. "They could be here any minute now. And I don't think there's a thing in this world that can stop them."

"And just how are you going to pay for all the damage, once your uninvited guests have broken my bar to pieces?"

"Well, if you're lucky, you'll live."

The barkeeper let out a smile, flashing an array of rotting gums and broken teeth. In one quick move, he reached below the counter and pulled out a shotgun. He cocked it once with a flick of his wrist, waiting for the inn to fall silent.

"Pay now or pay later, but whatever your choice, run for your lives," he screeched at the top of his lungs.

He fired into the air. Pieces of the ceiling smashed down onto the bar. Some got up and ran out without paying. Chairs broke apart. It was dangerous just watching. In no time, the place was nearly empty. A few had tried to throw money at the counter but missed and now the money was on the floor. No one stopped to pick it up.

In the corner of the bar a man wearing a robe stood up. He had a hood covering most of his face and as he walked over he pulled the hood down and revealed a bald head, except for a long braid of hair in the back. Lucerne jumped out in front of him, ready to strike.

"Stop right there!" she yelled. "Who are you?"

"I am a humble traveler," he said and made a simple bow to her. "But the two warriors coming this way, they will not stop until you are dead."

"Who are they?" Tennyson asked, motioning Lucerne to step back. "How do you know?"

"They are known as the Brothers Kuo. One can see for a thousand miles and the other can hear for a thousand miles, which makes them almost invincible. They were once mighty generals who did terrible things in a country far from here. I have been tracking them for years now. I intend to return them to the dark realm from which they came."

"What can you do to stop them?" Lucerne asked.

"Inside these two flasks," he said, holding up two jars of clay tied together by a string, "are the souls of the two warriors who are now approaching. I intend to bargain with them. If they refuse to yield to me, I will break the flasks and their souls will be banished from this world forever. But if they value their existence and are willing to do my bidding, I will take possession of their power and use it to return this world to its natural order."

"I hope you're right," the barkeeper said. "But just in case you're not, I'll keep my shotgun handy."

The monk suddenly noticed me standing by the bar. "You shouldn't be here!" he screamed, pointing at me. "You shouldn't be on this plane of existence."

Before I had time to respond, the earth moved beneath my feet. We ran to the window to look out. It was raining now and lightning struck a tree nearby, setting it on fire. The threatening shadows of the two monolithic warriors filled the night sky.

"Can you move them again?" Tennyson asked.

I shook my head. I was far too exhausted to even try.

The monk ran outside to meet them. He held the jars in the air and yelled at the approaching figures. With the storm at full tilt, we heard nothing he said, but it didn't seem to matter. The warriors continued to march our way. The monk fell on his knees, ready to break the flasks on the ground, and that's when Tennyson indicated the door to the side of the bar.

With little choice, we ran out into the rain and jumped on the motorcycle, immediately getting drenched. He pointed the bike down the road and we sped away into the night.

When I looked back, one of the stone warriors had raised its staff into the air, ready to strike the monk out of the way. Then came another crack of lightning, blinding me momentarily, and by the time I could see again, the scene was lost behind us somewhere in the dark.

# Part Four

#  Into the Kingdom

The monk had failed to stop the two stone warriors. I was sure of it. I could feel it in my bones. They were following us even now, throughout the night. Tennyson drove like a madman, not stopping for anything, not even to rest. I fought to keep my eyes glued behind us, but my head kept falling and I slept for minutes at a time.

By early morning we were cold and shivering as we approached the walls of the Kingdom. Tennyson talked in a whisper to the guard at the gate and we were allowed to enter. We parked the bike in front of a merchant's shop and Tennyson went in to talk to someone, asking for directions. Amelia had told us to find a man named Archer. Tell him everything, she'd said, and he would help us.

The Kingdom spread out over a vast mountainside. There were massive stone walls protecting it on all sides. Inside the gates and along the streets a sea of people swirled about on their way here and there. The houses were made mostly of brick and mud, nothing that would last forever. Much of the Kingdom appeared to be in a bad state of renovation, as if an earthquake had shifted the entire layout a few degrees off the map.

I hadn't been around so many people in a long time, not that I could remember. An onslaught of humanity shuffled and thrived everywhere on the streets. I watched them closely, none aware of the imminent danger approaching the city. Feeling oppressed, I turned toward one of the shops and looked in the window. In the reflection I saw myself standing next to Lucerne. We appeared as if two faint ghosts were withering away in a mire of gray.

The images of people around us entered and left the reflection, but none of them appeared human anymore. The souls I now saw passing by sent a shiver down my spine as they drifted in and out of view, ghosts much like ourselves, chasing a future that might never materialize. Then darkness spread across the world. I thought I saw a man who looked like Tarkentower but when I turned to search the crowds, he was gone.

"What is it? What do you see?" Lucerne asked, grabbing my arm.

"Something's not right."

"I feel it, too. Something is off with this place."

"What should we do?" I fought back the urge to duck below the crowd and hide.

"I don't know," she said, stepping closer. "I always wanted to be in the middle of something important. Yet here we are and all I can think about is running away."

A surge went through me, the blue crystal that possessed my soul giving me strength. "Remember what you taught me about tying the knot in the rope? We just need to focus our minds."

She turned and looked deeply into my eyes. Then she calmed herself and stood up straight. When I glanced again at the dark clouds in the window they were gone. The sun was shining. Tennyson was still inside talking to the shop owner.

"We're all good," he said as he returned. "Get on the bike."

We ran the motorcycle up the road, made a few turns, and stopped in front of a house.

A man had just stepped out the front door. He turned and locked the door and then walked down the steps on his way to the street. When he noticed us looking at him, he turned back toward the house. In a state of panic he fished for the keys in his pocket with one hand and tried to turn the handle on the door with the other. We ran up the stairs and surrounded him before he could step back inside.

"My name is Lewis Fuller," I said and grabbed his hand and shook it.

"Amelia sent us," Lucerne chimed in, grabbing his other hand and shaking it as well.

Instead of shaking hands, Tennyson only looked at the befuddled man and nodded. Confusion slowly drained from his face as our words sank in. Then his eyes widened and his expression lit up.

"I'll say! Amelia? What a small world this is, empty though it appears. She sent you?" he exclaimed, stroking his chin and scratching his ear at the same time, after regaining control of his hands.

Tennyson dug into his backpack and pulled out one of the notebooks Amelia had given to him. He handed it to the man and we waited as he flipped through the pages. While he scanned them, he nodded, whispering to himself, rapture spreading across his face. A moment later he returned to his senses and noticed us standing there.

"Come in. Do come in! My name is Archer. You can call me that," he said and led us into his house.

We introduced ourselves again and repeated the part about Amelia sending us here. This time he appeared to fully understand what we were saying. He gave us something strong to drink and offered us some bread and cheese, which I consumed rudely, too hungry to care about manners at a time like this. Cold and tired by the ride through the night, all I wanted to do was find a corner where I could curl up and sleep.

"What do you think?" Tennyson asked, indicating Amelia's notebooks.

The man flipped through them all, completely distracted, pausing here and there, eyes lit up like stars in the night sky. He let out a slight gasp of surprise at times. This went on for a while, long after we'd finished eating, and my eyes grew heavy and I had to prop my head up on my hands.

"I must spend the day studying these," he announced, looking up at last. "The data that lies herein is vital to my research. I take it you are tired and in need of some rest?"

We nodded in unison. He showed us a bathtub and indicated which rooms we might sleep in.

"The water in the city flows by its own power," he explained. "It's diverted through channels to each residence. You won't believe it until you try it."

"Is it hot?" Lucerne asked.

"Why, yes! A marvel," Archer shouted in my ear. "This is the first time we've had anything like it in the Kingdom."

"I guess things really have improved around here," Tennyson responded, rolling his eyes.

I only had to unstop a hole in the side of the bathtub to let warm water pour in. I nearly fell asleep in the water. Then I dried myself off and wandered back to my bedroom. The covers were thick and soft and smelled like leaves falling in the autumn wind. It took no time for my eyes to close and I entered into a world where clocks stopped ticking all by themselves.

Later in the afternoon I woke up feeling a little groggy, but much more rested. I explored the house a bit unsure and accidentally stumbled into Lucerne's room. She looked stunning, lying there in the sunlight, her soft skin glowing, but she was sleeping peacefully and I decided not to disturb her. I continued trying different doors until I found Archer in the study with his nose stuck in one of Amelia's notebooks.

He was a man obsessed with words. What little research Amelia had done might disappear into a crack in the floor in a library like his. Although there were massive volumes stacked in abundance on every wall, from the look on Archer's face, Amelia's work was priceless.

"I shouldn't be here," I said.

"Nonsense," Archer said. "Any friend of Amelia's is a friend of mine."

"That's what the monk said," I explained. "I shouldn't be on this plane of existence."

He looked up at me, his eyes wide with curiosity, and waited for me to explain. Before I could speak, Tennyson walked in and sat down. I told the story of the monk we'd met and the two stone warriors who were approaching the Kingdom this very minute.

"This monk, tell me, was he from the East or the West?"

"I don't know. His head was shaved, except for a long braid in the back."

"That explains it then."

"Explains what?"

"He was from the East. The two statues following you, they were also from the East."

"And?" I asked. "What was he talking about? Is it somehow connected to the blue crystal?"

He paused for a moment, carefully closing the notebook in his hands. While I waited for an answer, Lucerne wandered into the room and sat down next to me.

"Blue crystal," Archer said. "Blue jade. Blue Jupiter. Call it what you like. I personally like the name Blue Jupiter, because it conjures up an image closest to what might be the truth behind its unusual origin. The first recorded existence of it here on earth comes from the East, somewhere in the Himalayan Mountains, around 9,000 years ago. A later legend in Egypt says it didn't originate from here at all, but came from the sky, falling to earth like a burning ball of blue flame. And then some claim it came from the very throne of God. You might be familiar with the story of the Ten Commandments mentioned in the Bible. Scholars believe the stone tablets were made out of the same material and only a holy man could handle them. Anyone else who touched them died miserably on the spot. Really, really just amazing stuff. It's crystalline, but it has the ability to replicate itself just like a living organism."

"You mean it's nothing new? It didn't appear here because of the disruption in time?" Lucerne asked.

"No. Contrary to popular opinion, most of what you see going on around you is nothing new at all."

"But how do you explain all these unusual events? Such as the stone warriors?"

"I take it you're familiar with the legend of Tarkentower? I'm pretty sure there's a lot of truth to that, just as Amelia's notebooks here are confirming. And yes, that part of our planet's history, his machine that altered time, is unusual. However, the consequences of Tarkentower's actions have very little to do with these things which appear abnormal to you."

"Why?" I asked.

"Those strange phenomena are really just a part of the natural course of the history of our planet from the dawn of time."

"Why?" I said again, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

"Wait a minute," Lucerne said. "You're saying things like the stone warriors would be happening here on this future earth even if Tarkentower had never turned on his machine. I'm not buying that."

"They would be happening, because they have always been happening, but not in such obvious ways as you see them happening today."

"I still don't get it," I said and dropped my head back against the chair. The ceiling looked clouded and far away.

"Let me repeat myself. Things like the power of the blue crystal and the animations such as your fighting statues, these things have all been happening for a long time. It's only been in the last couple thousand years that those kinds of things have for the most part disappeared from the public eye. Due to our naive attempts to delete them out of the chronicles of science, nobody hears much about them anymore. People have been refusing to accept things that are different, out of fear, a fear of something they don't understand."

"I follow that. At least I think I do," I said, the fog lifting a little. The ceiling had come into focus. "Go on."

"When Tarkentower flipped the switch and stuck the earth into a loop, he made it so that only people would be forced to stay in the past. As you can clearly see by looking around you, the planet and everything attached to it has been allowed to continue on to the next day. And that includes all kinds of undocumented and unexplained phenomena, things we would have considered fiction before Tarkentower's experiment began, simply because those kinds of events weren't occurring very often."

"And so now," Tennyson concluded, "creatures like the stone warriors are allowed to go around unchecked, because there aren't a lot of people sending them into hiding anymore."

"Yes. Exactly! A good student you are there. The balance of nature has shifted away from science and moved back towards magic once more, just like it was in mythological times."

"How do you know so much about it?" I asked.

"From history books, mostly. By looking closely at the world and all that has happened since the beginning of recorded time, you'll find the fighting stone warriors are nothing new here at all. They were a big part of eastern history over a thousand years ago, two fierce generals who fought with the goddess Matzu and lost. After that, they were destined to stand by her side and protect her. Knowledge of the world of magic nearly disappeared until recently, but traces of it are still there, if you open your mind and read your history."

"Really?" I asked. I had never spent much time with books before. I hadn't seen the value in them. "You got all that from books?"

"Books allow people like Amelia and I to do research in great detail about what life was like before we came to this present plane of existence. That...and satellites."

"You mean there are active satellites hovering above us right now?" Lucerne asked.

"Yes, of course, my dear. I will reiterate. All inanimate objects from the old earth are here now on this future earth. Only the bulk of the human race is missing."

"How can the satellites help us?" I asked, more curious than ever.

"It's not so easy. Satellites take a lot of energy to access. And energy is not so easy to come by these days. But we're working on that. Currently, the data they have is restricted to scientists with the highest authority."

"Here we go again," Tennyson said, hitting the table with his hand. "Why can't information valuable to everyone be shared freely with everyone? Why does it always have to stay in the hands of the few?"

Archer looked befuddled. "But what if that information got into the wrong hands?"

"Can the satellites recall the data from within the time loop?" I asked, getting back to the point.

"In a way, they can. Mostly, though, whenever we try to explore that data, there's a logical mismatch in the time stamp and our computers freeze up. However, we know when we are looking at the right data because that's when the programs in the lab all start going bent and sideways. The guys in white jackets have made some attempts at using fuzzy logic to induce the computers into accepting the skewed state of time. In fact, I heard some interesting new discoveries were made just recently."

"Like what?" Lucerne asked, taking the bait.

"It's called the Time List. We have a list of all the people who were on the earth before the time loop started. That information was already stored in the master databases, long before the Big Event, as we like to call it. We can assume most of those people are still stuck in the loop right now. And we also have a list of the people who are on this side of the loop, here on this future earth, thanks to the surveys conducted by our rangers. As you can imagine, the computers that are analyzing the data from the satellites can't easily cope with this big discrepancy in population, so safeguards have been programmed into them."

"Do these discrepancies in numbers have anything to do with the occurrence of the Star Burns?" Tennyson asked.

"Yes, they do. It's interesting you mention that. There were about 8 billion people on the planet when Tarkentower switched on his machine. Whenever a Star Burn occurs, suddenly there are about a thousand less, all unaccounted for, missing from the database. And at the same time, when we correlate surveys of current activity here, they show that approximately a thousand new people have since taken up residence on our map. Well, the numbers don't exactly match. Some people go totally missing and no one knows exactly why. It's rather sad, when you think about it. They just disappear into the void."

"Can we take a look at this list?" I asked, feeling fully alert now. Something had just clicked in the back of my mind. "Maybe this list will help us find Tarkentower. I mean, his computer must have a list of people and it's probably really similar to your list. In fact, it's likely his machine is using the same satellites that you are. You could trace his signal back to its source and find his location."

"That's not a bad idea!" Archer said and sat up. "Why didn't I think of that before?"

"And then we could restore the natural order of things. We could put the earth back on track," Lucerne said.

"Well..." Archer said and looked out the window.

"Why not?" I asked, looking back and forth between Tennyson and Archer.

"To tell the truth, I'm not sure what's possible. I need more data," Archer said. "I will definitely check into it." He bent forward and scribbled a page-full of notes on a small scrap of paper he'd grabbed from the tabletop.

I got up and walked over to a tall bookcase and picked up a book from the shelf. It was a history of mythical creatures, complete with vivid drawings, written in a language I couldn't understand, but the pictures sparked another question in my mind. "Are you telling me that these vampires really existed?"

"No. Vampires were merely a creation of pop culture. Being able to live forever by sucking the blood out of people is purely fantasy."

"What about these other things here? These zombies?" I scratched my head. "They look a lot like dead people who have been reanimated."

"It's true, there are braindead people coming through the gate during Star Burns. That's our biggest threat from the past right now. But again, the historical accounts of them are way off. They have nothing to do with infectious diseases. You can't become a zombie by being bitten by one. What I can't figure out is how they can be so strong when their flesh is rotting away. Once they grab you, their arms should just fall off. Yet accounts we have of encounters with them say they are stronger than you can image. I have to admit, we scientists haven't got it all figured out yet."

"How do we know what is safe and what to avoid?" Lucerne asked.

"That's exactly what I spend most of my time researching. The recent dead who were stuck inside the time loop were forced to revive and live out the same traumatic experience over and over. I can understand why they come here in such a deranged state of mind."

"But isn't it also possible that Tarkentower's experiment will soon be driving everyone in the loop insane? Just how many of them does he plan to send our way?" I asked. "And exactly how does he choose who comes here next?"

Nobody had an answer. Tennyson spoke up, reminding us of the immediate problem. "We need to address the Council and inform them of the approaching threat. Those stone warriors will arrive here any moment now. The people in the Kingdom have a right to know about this imminent danger. They need to be given time to prepare for whatever may happen once the Kingdom is under attack."

"That may be a problem," Archer said. "The Council won't be meeting for another month. They are on vacation right now. But I could call an emergency meeting and gather them together. Keep in mind, however, I'm a scientist, not a politician. There may be some resistance to your sudden return. Remember what happened the last time you stood before them."

"I'm prepared for that," Tennyson said. "As a ranger, I have a sworn responsibility to the people of this future earth."

With the beginning of a plan, we went into the kitchen to cook up something to eat. Archer made a big bowl of spaghetti with a whole range of flavors King had never tried. He added mushrooms and tomatoes plus a handful of other herbs that made my mouth water, just thinking about them. Food here in the Kingdom was definitely better.

After we finished eating, Archer ran off to convince the Council to convene for an emergency meeting. Lucerne wanted to explore the neighborhood and I tried walking around the block with her, but whenever I came across someone I didn't know, it only made me feel more alienated. I let her go and hurried back to Archer's house.

For the rest of the day I spent most of my time in the library reading about strange creatures and faraway lands. In the evening, Archer returned and had some good news to share.

"I've managed to pull the Council together on short notice," he said. "They will hear your appeal tomorrow at noon. So let's put on our best show and hit them were it hurts."

"Excellent," Tennyson agreed. "I've got a few choice words I'd like to share with some of my old enemies."

None of us were sleepy when the sun went down. We stayed up late, talking into the evening about what would happen tomorrow. We went through different scenarios, Tennyson and Archer practicing their arguments back and forth, as if they were on opposing sides in front of a judge. Lucerne and I kept score.

Within no time, Tennyson was primed for a fight. Not only was he physically looking like a ranger again, ready for battle, he was also mentally as sharp as a knife. There was an air in the room that things would soon change for the better. Archer was sure the Kingdom would never be the same again.

After their sparring had faded, I took a book back to my room and read it until my eyes couldn't distinguish the words from the page anymore. It was about the Roman civilization and the fall of that empire. I wanted to catch up on the history of the old earth, a history I had never known much about. I managed to cover several chapters in the book by skimming through the pages and reading only the most interesting parts before the story faded into obscurity as I drifted off to sleep.

#  Courts and Chaos

I woke up worried that today wasn't going to go as well as planned. The Kingdom might turn out to be just like Tennyson had originally described it. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many people making decisions and nothing good getting done. I couldn't help feeling like we were wasting our time here.

I couldn't understand why we were waiting, either. Appealing to the Council wasn't getting us any closer to finding Tarkentower. But Archer thought we needed the support of the scientific community to go about it the right away. And to get that, we needed the support of the political elite here in the Kingdom. It was complicated.

Tennyson said we were a team and I needed to respect what everyone wanted. Security was equally important to all of those involved. All I could do is wait and see how events turned out.

Throughout the morning, Tennyson paced around the house. When the time approached for him to make his presentation, we went with him to a dome-shaped building in the middle of the city where the Council met under high security

None of us were allowed to enter the room except for Tennyson. Once the doors were closed and locked, we had no idea what was going on inside. He came out an hour later looking completely disgusted.

"Those ignorant swine!" he said and proceeded down the street at a horse's pace.

We ran after him. Just around the corner we found him walking back and forth, hammering his fist into the side of his leg.

"What happened?" Archer asked.

"They said they've already searched for the two stone warriors. As soon as they got word of our arrival in the Kingdom, upon hearing the terrible 'rumors' we were spreading, they sent out scouts into the countryside in the direction we came from. They even employed a satellite trace, which wasted a fortune in reserve energy, or so they told me, but they found nothing. The two stone warriors are nowhere to be found. Gone! Vanished into thin air. Now the Council is calling me a liar, saying I created another hoax to gain public attention with my sudden return."

"But we saw it ourselves. We saw them coming this way," Lucerne said.

"I suggest we return home immediately and discuss this later," Archer said, eyeing everyone passing us by. "I'm not sure how safe it is to talk here."

We followed him down the street to his house and slipped inside when we thought no one was watching. Archer had drawn the curtains and lit several candles by the time I sat down in the library. Tennyson was looking cautiously outside to see if we had been followed.

"That's twice now that I've gone before the Council," he said. "And twice I've been discredited."

"Don't take it so hard. They're not any easy lot to convince. For safety reasons, they have to verify everything they hear," Archer explained.

Lucerne went into the kitchen and returned with a pot of tea and poured each of us a cup. I sipped mine slowly, looking down at the floor, unsure what to do next. I was clueless when it came to politics. The tea was a mixture of flowers and herbs and it helped me relax. Tennyson wasn't coping so well. He slammed his cup down, spilling its contents everywhere. Then he proceeded by drinking straight from the pot.

"There may be a way to salvage this," Archer said. "Let me tell you what happened right after you disappeared last time. Initially, your assessment of the threat in the northern zone wasn't taken seriously. By the time concern over the issue had spread, you'd already vanished. It was assumed you'd gone to explore by yourself and something tragic had happened, because you never came back. No one, not even I, suspected you'd given up and walked away. A team was assembled and sent out to find you.."

"I wasn't aware of any of this," Tennyson said, listening closely.

"The team sent to find you disappeared as well. After that, the Council restricted anyone from going anywhere near the region, not until more data could be collected. I haven't heard another word about it in a long time. I assumed the satellite research facility was backed up with things of a higher priority."

"But how is all this going to help me out now?" he whined.

"You will need to go before the Council one more time," Archer said and held up a hand when Tennyson started to object. "Now the tide has turned. Someone needs to get into the northern zone and find out what happened to the team sent to find you. And the most qualified person would be you. Once you point out that you didn't really go there, the fact that our team went missing will look highly suspicious. Personally, I'm starting to doubt they ever sent a team."

"Can you get him another audience with the Council after what happened today?" Lucerne asked.

Tennyson scowled at her and she winced.

"I don't know," Archer said. "It's worth a try. And this time I think we should both be present at the meeting. That will give you more credibility. Let me do all the talking. It will ruin my reputation if we fail, but it's a risk I'm willing to take."

"What will you say?" Tennyson asked.

"I will tell them the plan is mine and I have nominated you to go with me. I'm sure the people of the Kingdom would like to know what happened to our team. The Council may think they wield power, but public opinion still counts for something here. If we can present our case as representatives of the people, they will have no choice but to hear us out."

"Even if they don't agree, can't we go anyway?" I asked.

"Yes, we could. But it would be a lot better if we had their resources at our disposal, such as data gathered from the satellites."

"I think I can get access to the map room," Tennyson said. "I'm still a ranger, even if not an active one. I never officially resigned."

"I want to go with you," Lucerne said. "You promised you'd show me how to enter the academy for rangers after we arrived in the Kingdom."

"That I did," he said and nodded.

"Good. Then it's all settled," Archer said triumphantly.

For the rest of the day we worked out the details of what a journey into the northern zone would entail. Although we didn't broach the subject, I knew we would go, even if the Council prohibited it. Things were looking up since this morning.

Lucerne had regained her confidence and was ready for a fight. She said she couldn't wait to face danger again.

I wanted to explore the open road. In just a short time, less than a week, we'd moved from the fringe of society into the heart of the thriving world. It had opened up my mind wider than I thought was possible.

And Tennyson looked more alive than I'd ever seen him. It was clear that he was ready to follow his instincts and see if he had been right about the potential trouble brewing in the northern zone.

And Archer was as happy as a kid who'd just walked out of school and boarded the bus for a field trip to the science museum.

After a hearty dinner, Archer went out to see about setting up a new meeting with the Council. There was a growing resentment among the people of the Kingdom, a sense that the members of the Council were not doing anything. The leadership was simply stonewalling every attempt at progress in an effort to keep the status quo.

"I really don't get what this is all about, but it seems exciting," I said as we washed the dishes in warm water.

"It's all about job security," Tennyson explained in a bitter way. "These Council members are in power for life. They can only be ousted by force."

"So they are like judges who make political decisions," I said, trying my best to understand it.

"Yes. Since you put it that way, I'd have to agree. They never have to run for re-election. And so they can afford to waste all the time in the world doing whatever they like."

"Even though these Council members are representatives of the people, they don't actually do anything the people want."

"That's right," Tennyson said and frowned.

"Why do people need representatives to vote for them? Can't you just count the votes of the people directly?" Lucerne inquired.

"Currently, no," Tennyson said. "But maybe someday that will be the case. With the aid of technology, I could see it being tried. And maybe someday, you can be the one to implement that change."

Archer returned at that moment, looking excited. He explained that he had called in a few favors from other leading scientists around the Kingdom in order to convince the Council to meet for a second time in a row. He also had some additional news to share with us.

"Lewis, there was something that you said when you first arrived here."

"I don't remember anything special. What was it?"

"You said you'd met a monk in a tavern."

"Yes."

"And the monk said, correct me if I'm wrong, 'You should not be on this plane of existence.' Is that right?"

"That's true."

"I did some data polling and want to share the results with you. The monk was right."

"What?" Lucerne said, stepping closer to me. "Of course he should be here."

"What I mean is Lewis didn't get here by the usual method. Instead of arriving like we did, he came here another way. According to the theory, people are picked out by a computer and then allowed to skip to the next day in time. I mean, the next day in our present time. In your case, Lewis, the machine didn't choose you. You don't appear on any of the lists we have of valid candidates. And our lists are pretty accurate when it comes down to who can skip ahead and who can't."

"So how did he get here?" Tennyson asked.

"There might be a gap in the fabric of time, but I doubt that. What do you remember about it?"

"I just remember feeling like every day was the same boring routine. Then one day I got really sick of it. I got sick of nothing every changing. At that moment, I just wanted to make it all disappear. I mean, I really hated everything in the world. You don't know how much I can hate something when it really bothers me. And suddenly, just like that, I was here in the future."

"Lucerne, do you remember seeing a Star Burn before he arrived here?" Archer asked.

"We had just found another survivor, another crazy one. Deon put him down. At that time, we were surprised to find Lewis, but we didn't give it much thought. Maybe his Star Burn had happened at night. Or he came through with the first guy. Until now, I haven't thought much about that."

"It might be possible the computer picked the wrong person," Archer said and the room fell silent.

"Can computers do that?" I asked, feeling less and less comfortable. The walls of the room looked like they were moving farther and farther apart.

"If a computer gets a virus, it can do any number of unexpected things," he said.

"How many people know about this?" Tennyson asked, visibly concerned, his face pale. "Did you tell anyone about Lewis?"

"No, not a soul. The people over at the lab were pretty excited when I suggested we run a trace on the satellites to see if anyone else was using them. No one had ever thought of that before. They immediately saw the value in checking into it. While they were busy doing that, I sat down at a spare terminal and ran a search through the databases to find information on Lewis. I wanted to see what we had on file. That's when the discrepancy came up. Lewis is on the list of restricted candidates."

"What?" I said. The room spun a bit and then did a tilt. I thought I was going to nosedive onto the floor.

"Lewis has a rather unusual skill," Tennyson said. "We were hoping to keep it a secret, but I think we can tell you about it now, since you're a part of the team. You must understand, though, what I am about to say can't go beyond these walls."

'Walls _...'_ I thought. I tried counting all four of them, but kept coming up with six.

"Agreed," Archer said and grabbed a notebook and pencil.

"Sorry." Tennyson shook his head. "No notes."

"I am a scientist," Archer insisted. "If we're to have any hope at all for a future, I must write down what you're about to tell me."

Tennyson looked at me and nodded. I read his thoughts without trying. The notebook in Archer's hand disappeared. One moment he had it firmly in his grasp and the next he was flailing about, trying to locate it on the floor below his desk. When it became clear to him that the notebook was no longer in the room, he got back up and sat down on the corner of his desk, attempting to arrange himself calmly. His face had turned green and he was struggling to hold his scholarly attitude intact. He reached out slowly for another notebook, but then looked over at me when I made that one vanish too.

"How on this universe are you doing that?" he yelled.

"Lewis can make things move through time and space," Tennyson explained.

"I can see that. What I am asking is how?"

"Magic," I said and smiled.

"Oh, I see now. Why didn't I notice that out sooner," he said and rolled his eyes.

"Remember to breathe," I told him.

"And is there any way you can transfer this magical ability to someone else? Someone like me?"

"I doubt it. Honestly, it hasn't been a very useful thing. So far all I've managed to do is to scare a lot of people."

"I know how he did it," Lucerne said abruptly, causing everyone to freeze. "Lewis moved himself from the old earth to this one."

"Can I move people?" I looked over at Tennyson.

"I hadn't considered that possibility before," he said and scratched his head.

"I'd almost be too scared to try. What if somebody got hurt?"

"Hold on a minute," Lucerne said, looking at Archer. "You said the machine follows a set of rules when it chooses who will go forward next in time."

"Yes, it does."

"And why wouldn't it pick Lewis?"

"His family has a history of madness."

"What?" I said. The room started doing loops again and I had to grab on to myself to keep from falling over.

"Madness?" Tennyson asked, letting out a whistle.

"Or magic," Lucerne replied.

"Maybe you're right there," Archer said and looked around his desk for a book on the subject. When he couldn't find the book he looked at me. I shrugged. I really had no idea where the book had gone.

"It makes me want to destroy that machine even more, now that I know that it's not random," Lucerne said. "What gives anyone the right to decide what happens to my life? No one determines my future but me."

"I didn't exactly have time to see who he is related to," Archer continued. "I had to narrow down the search to just his name to speed things up. I was pretty worried I'd get caught snooping around with sensitive data like that. Security is really tight over there, you know."

"We are glad for what you discovered," Tennyson said. "But please explain more fully. What is this about madness? Crazy people show up here all the time."

"Tarkentower built the machine to keep certain people from coming through to this side of the loop, people who might be a threat to him. He knew about the people who had already been declared insane when he turned his machine on. Apparently, he doesn't know that people can go crazy living inside the loop. Experiencing the same day over and over again, what a life that must be. We were never meant to live that way, stuck in repetitiousness. The mind needs change to stay healthy."

"And so he eliminated the possibility of a transition out of the time loop by people previously associated with metal disorders," I said. "That is why I shouldn't be on this future earth."

"How do you know this is true?" Lucerne asked.

"The data we've collected says nobody with a prior history of mental instability has ever come through a Star Burn before," Archer said and spread his hands.

"I thought I was different because of the contact I had with the blue crystal, but it sounds like I've always been a freak."

"It was the blue crystal that brought your magic to life," Archer explained. "It's your family heritage that makes you immune to the negative effects of the blue crystal, I suspect."

"You're no freak" Lucerne said and grabbed my hand.

"Your gift, Lewis, it's magic, not a disorder," Tennyson pointed out. Then he stood up. "And it may just be the one thing we really need to put an end to all this insanity."

#  Beyond the Kingdom

Archer spread the word that the Council was growing useless. By morning, the crowds were on fire. The people of the Kingdom jumped on the bandwagon with the idea of a revolt against the government burning fresh in their minds. The Council had no choice but to call another emergency meeting and hear what we had to say.

"You better not go in," Tennyson said, just outside the door, motioning for me to stay where I was. "It's too risky. When we're finished, we'll come out and get you."

"I'll stay here too," Lucerne said. "He won't be safe alone."

"Good idea," Archer said. "The fewer people inside, the better. We don't want the Council knowing exactly who we are associating with."

We wished them good luck and the doors closed.

We stood in silence for a while, watching people on the streets. Time passed slowly. A man approached us out of the crowd and indicated he wanted to talk to me. He was dressed in a heavy robe with a hood pulled over his head. I had no idea who he was.

"You shouldn't be here," he said.

"Oh, no. Not again..." I mumbled under my breath.

"You are being watched at this very moment," he explained, leaning in to talk to us. "Follow me and I'll take you to safety."

"Not so fast," Lucerne countered. "Where do you want to take us? And who is watching?"

From out of the crowd half a dozen armed men appeared, forming a semi-circle around us, trapping us against the doors. The two guards protecting the doors made a weak effort to stop them, but then stepped back after the man in the hood waved them away.

"You are a danger to everyone in the Kingdom!" the man said at the top of his lungs, pointing at me.

The crowd of people on the street stopped. Several rushed over to see what was happening. I looked at Lucerne and shrugged, clueless about what to do next.

"Step forward and pretend to attack. I'll swing the doors open behind you and we can jump inside," Lucerne whispered.

"Got it," I replied and focused my mind.

Without warning, I jumped at the men, taking them by surprise. Before they regained their senses, Lucerne opened the doors and we rushed backward until we were standing inside the room. Archer was in the middle of a speech, his finger pointing at the ceiling. Tennyson nudged him and nodded in our direction.

With our abrupt entrance, three members of the Council stood up. To my surprise, our attackers didn't stop with our entrance into the chamber, but continued to follow us inside.

"What is the purpose of this intrusion, Nebasmeal?" the highest ranking Council member asked the hooded man.

"These people are in full violation of our founding principles. You must hear our case. That boy, brought here by the ranger known as Tennyson, is not from this world. Stand back! I warn you. His existence threatens the lives of all those living within the walls of the Kingdom."

The man dropped his hood, revealing a scarred and ancient face. All eyes turned toward Tennyson. Then they looked at me. It was clear I was the person in question.

"What are you talking about? I'm just a kid," I mumbled.

"His family has a history of madness. We have confirmed it by checking his records in our data base. He should not be here. It's not possible for him to pass through a Star Burn," Nebasmeal said.

Tennyson looked at Archer. Archer looked at Nebasmeal. Nebasmeal looked at me, his withered finger extended in my direction. The room was silent. I tried to think of a way out of this one, but came up empty.

"Are you mental or something?" Lucerne suddenly asked. "Of course he should be here. He was born on this future earth. He didn't come from the past, not like most of us. I lived with his mother and father for several years after I arrived here. They told me stories of when he was a baby. You've clearly mixed him up with someone else."

This was news to me. But it sounded plausible and I nodded strongly.

"You don't even know my real name," I said, mocking them. "I've been going around by the name of somebody else, Lewis Fuller. I found that on the shirt of a dead kid. That's not me."

Nebasmeal looked confused. There was no way he could confirm my real identity on the spot. I couldn't even confirm it. A moment later he regained his composure.

"This case must be fully investigated until all the facts are clear. The safety of everyone in the Kingdom depends on it. I insist that the Council place this boy under arrest in the meantime," he said.

"The Council will call a vote," one of the elder members said. "All in favor of restricting the boy's access in the Kingdom, show a hand."

Ten hands went up. Two were undecided. Archer looked like he would make one more appeal, but gave up and came over to stand next to me. The vote had been cast and there was no way of changing their minds now. Orders were issued and guards flanked me on both sides.

"We'll get you out. Don't worry about that," Tennyson whispered.

I was marched out of the room and down the street. By now, word had spread about the disturbance and people were lining the roads to get a look at me. As we advanced, I overheard onlookers talking about the power of Council.

"Finally, they've done something about our safety," a red-haired woman said to her neighbor.

"It's about time. I was beginning to lose faith in them," someone replied.

I was marched down several streets, paraded in front of everyone. We made a number of turns and I got the impression we were going in a large circle. About a half hour later, the guards stopped. We'd entered an alley where the crowds had thinned out and then disappeared altogether. One guard looked over at me and gave me a pat on the back.

"Any friend of Tennyson's is a friend of ours," he said, grinning from ear to ear. "There isn't a more honest man in the Kingdom. You're free to go."

"Really? Thanks," I said and hesitated, unsure where to go.

"We'll create a distraction," the other guard explained. "There will be no question that you escaped. Now, run like the wind!"

"But don't go home," the first one said. "Your friends will meet you across town at the northwestern gate. Farewell. And good luck."

With that, the two guards began to brawl. I jumped back. They jostled each other, a little playfully at first, but then the fight became serious. They'd both be covered in bruises by tomorrow.

I had no clear idea which way to go. I just ran as far away from there as I could. Once I was out in the open, I tried to walk casually down the street, hoping no one would recognize me so soon after my arrest. But deep inside, I wanted nothing more than to climb into a hole somewhere and hide.

"Follow me. I know the way," a voice said.

A dark figure jumped out of the shadows so abruptly that I flinched. It was Lucerne. She pulled out a compass, showing me the direction to the northern wall.

We were off in a blaze, turning left and right through a maze of passages and back roads until we came to the northern wall of the Kingdom. From there, we followed the wall as closely as we could, always moving to the left, looping around the city toward the northwestern gate.

When we arrived, Tennyson and Archer were already there, wearing thick robes, their breath a pale vapor in the cold. They had left the motorcycle behind and were sitting on horses. Archer threw a couple robes at us and we put them on, pulling the hoods up over our heads. Tennyson watched the road while Archer motioned for us to mount our horses in a hurry.

Lucerne looked happier than ever getting on a horse. She'd been born to ride. I attempted to mimic the nimble way she landed in the saddle, but my horse, for whatever reason, didn't care for the way I sat on it. It continued to shift its feet under me and I thought I'd fall off at any moment. Then I remembered to focus my mind and relax, letting the horse do its thing. I bent my knees slightly and let my arms hang out loosely in front of me, the reins dangling gently in my hands, the way Lucerne was doing.

Archer took up the lead and Lucerne went next. My horse seemed intent on following hers and I did little to influence it otherwise. Tennyson came up behind us, watching to see if anyone was following our trail.

We hardly spoke as we left the gates of the Kingdom and moved back out into the wild. It was good to be on the road again. I couldn't wait to see where we were going. Now, we were bound to make progress. I was sure of it.

Wanting to travel fast, we traveled light, carrying little more than a soft-skinned backpack suspended over our shoulders. The day was cold as we hurried along the road between the trees. Winter was catching up fast. When we were just a short distance from the walls of the Kingdom we took a side trail, a mere dirt path that no one would have noticed. Our horses breathed plumes of air and we sat on them like ghosts going onward toward heaven.

I watched the barren trees passing flanking the path, spellbound by the color of the autumn leaves blanketing the ground below my dangling feet. The trail wound back and forth as it took us up into the mountains. The air grew colder, piercing my skin deeper with each passing moment. I pulled my hood down around my face as we ascended in elevation. Throughout the day we continued to rise without even a pause to rest. Our horses needed little guidance as there was only one way to go on this lonely mountain trail.

When our stomachs could bear the emptiness no longer, we stopped to eat. In each of our packs was a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, not much to chew on, but it would have to do. We would need to eat sparingly from our supplies until we reached our destination.

I sat on an old log below a canopy of ancient trees while the thick wind swayed me from side to side as if the natural world were breathing in and out. When I finished, I got up and walked toward the next bend in the trail to see where it was taking us.

"Don't stray too far," Tennyson called out.

"That's won't be a problem," I replied. "Take a look at this."

He proceeded up the trail on foot to my location just around the outcropping of tall rocks. Lucerne and Archer followed, bringing the horses with them. The trail at this point should have passed through a narrow gap, a mountain pass just wide enough for a horse to travel through. But the way was blocked, the rocky walls joined from side to side by a thick barrier of blue crystal.

I drew a line in the dirt across the trail with my boot and cautioned them not to cross it. Archer held the reins on the horses tight while I moved in closer. When I touched the wall, I felt myself come alive. A deep longing inside me called out. The blue crystal started pulsing, glowing, thriving, dividing and merging, all in time with my heartbeat.

"What do you think? Can you move it?" Tennyson asked.

He was shaken. Archer looked as pale as a ghost. Only Lucerne appeared to be calm.

"Give me a moment," I said. "I need to think of a good place to send it to. It has to be somewhere safe. And it has to be a place I've seen before. It can't just be anywhere."

I picked up a pair of broken sticks, thin and crooked, and rubbed them together as if I was trying to start a fire in the winter chill. Then I waved them about in the air like I was conducting a symphony. I mumbled some senseless words and looked back at Lucerne and she smirked. She knew I was only pretending. I didn't really need this circus routine to make the stones disappear. But the wall didn't vanish. It remained were it was, as solid as before. I put my arms down.

"What's wrong?" Archer asked. "Why isn't it working?"

"I can't think of where to send it," I said and sighed. "I may have magic, but I haven't got much in the way of imagination."

"For the sake of saving time, why not just send the wall back right here, but in about 30 minutes from now," Tennyson said. "We should be safely on the other side by then. And as a bonus, we won't have to worry about being followed."

"Got it," I answered and the crystal disappeared.

Archer gasped. He looked at me and then looked at the gap in the rocks and then tried to look at me and the rocks at the same time.

"Remember to breathe once in a while," I teased.

"I've often said that magic is a part of the natural order of this world. Until now, never have I witnessed the magnitude of the power that you possess. You make it look so effortless."

I had forgotten to wave my arms and say the magic words, though, and that left me feeling a little let down with my performance. I turned toward the others and shrugged.

Before I could suggest we make the most of our time, a pack of black wolves, snarling and angry, came dashing through the gap in the wall and surrounded me, cutting off my retreat. They snapped at my robe as they circled around and around. The horses scampered back and Tennyson and Archer did everything they could to keep them from bolting. Lucerne approached the wolves and commanded them to stop, swinging her hands at them, but there was nothing she could do to help me.

Just then someone came walking through the pass. A tall hooded figure barked out something in a language I couldn't understand. The boy was taller and thinner than I was, but maybe a few years younger. He waited for the wolves to stop circling and then motioned for them to line up and sit down next to him.

"Nice trick with the wall," he said. "Can I ask how you did it?"

"I am a very powerful magician," I said, leaning forward and throwing my arms up in the air, the broken sticks pointing at the sky.

"I am honored to meet you, then," he said and stepped back, doing a playful bow. "I am also a magician. The blue crystal wall was mine. I shall ask you the first time, politely, please return it to the right place. The second time I won't be so patient. You are here uninvited and have disturbed my work."

"I am honored as well to meet you," I said, attempting to sound just as official. "The wall will return in a few minutes. I hope you don't mind waiting. I only wanted to get my friends through to the other side. I'd never have done such a thing without asking first, if I'd known it was your property. Maybe think about putting up a sign next time."

"I see," he said and thought for a minute. "I agree, a sign would be a good idea. Come to my house and we can have something warm to drink. You look really cold."

I was freezing and easily enticed by the sound of something to warm us up. Other than the wolves, the boy didn't appear all that intimidating. Tennyson blindfolded the horses to keep them from scattering in front of the wolves and we walked them through the pass. After we neared the boy's house the wall of blue crystal closed up behind us. The pack of wolves retreated to the side of the house where they curled up and went to sleep.

With the sound of the wolves gone, the horses became more manageable. We tied them to a tree before going inside the house. In the living room a welcoming fire glowed at us and we gathered around it to thaw our hands and feet.

"My name is Alexander and I guard the high pass," the boy said, introducing himself.

"Hello, Alexander. My name is Lewis and these are my friends." I shook his hand.

"Why the wall?" Archer asked, finally relaxing.

"There are spies in the Kingdom. The wall keeps them from going back and forth to the northern zone. Whatever work they are up to, I am not exactly sure. I take it you are not part of that network?"

"Certainly not," Lucerne said. "We are also trying to discover what they're doing."

Tennyson explained our expedition. "We have just fled from the Kingdom where the Council is under the influence of one treacherous scoundrel called Nebasmeal. Is he one of the spies you speak of?"

"He is the lord of the spies. If I was not bound by the task of protecting this high pass, I'd return to the Kingdom and have my wolves eat him alive."

"You also use magic to protect the natural order of this world, just like Lewis, is that right?" Lucerne asked.

He nodded but needed prodding to expand on the topic.

I asked, "Sorry if I'm a little slow, but I don't understand. How is it that you can do this?"

"Call me a son of dark magic, if you want. Banish me to the farthest corners of the earth. I know that feeling well. Many people in this day and age believe that any kind of magic is unnatural and should be abolished. In truth, Lewis and I would never dare bring any harm to anyone, if we could help it. Although I've never met him before, I'm already sure of it."

"Well spoken," I agreed.

"Every magician has different core talents," he went on. "I see you have the art of manipulation of time and space, a very powerful magic. Sometimes we will also have lesser talents, but those only grow to fruition later in life."

"What's your talent?" I asked.

"I can control the minds of animals. Well, usually. But not always. Some animals, no one can understand. And then there are those days when nothing goes right, if you know what I mean."

"But the wall of blue crystal," I asked. "How did you build it?"

"I built it by hand. It took me nearly a month to complete. When you made it disappear, I was highly concerned, so I sent out my wolves. If the enemy could do things like that, the war would already be lost. You are really a powerful wizard."

"I wouldn't have made it this far without my friends. They deserve more credit than I do."

"It seems like all young magicians share one common trait and that is the art of exaggeration," Tennyson said. "The truth is, we wouldn't be here if it weren't for you, Lewis. This is your journey. We're proud to follow you."

With that said, I introduced everyone by name to Alexander.

"Are you the same ranger who disappeared while looking for a route into the northern zone?" Alexander asked Tennyson.

He nodded and explained that he hadn't really gone into the region in question. This would be his first time traveling so far north.

"Excuse me for a moment. I don't usually have guests. Let me get you something to eat and drink."

He left us by the fire and retreated into the kitchen. When he returned, he held a tray of fresh biscuits and several jugs of hot cider. The cider was a bit tart. After finishing my cup, my head spun in circles in a curious way. The biscuits were warm and full of butter and went down fast.

"We've been traveling hard this day and need a place to sleep," Tennyson said. "Can we stay here for the night?"

"My house is small, but you can sleep in front of the fire. Then you may have share my breakfast before you go."

"Why are you here, guarding the pass?" Archer asked. "I wasn't aware the Council had sent anyone this way."

"Once they discovered my gift of magic down in the Kingdom, I was cast out. In particular, Nebasmeal was the root of my problems. When I get older and more practiced in the ways of my art, I plan to return and set the record straight."

"We are familiar with his misdirection," Tennyson said, nodding. "I heard they sent out a second team to find me after I disappeared. How did they get past your wall?"

"They never came this way. I don't think they were ever sent in search of you. If they had been, I'd have known about it."

"The Council is all an act, then, just as I have long suspected," Archer said.

"Someone is certainly pulling their strings, someone who doesn't want us to get into the northern zone," Tennyson said.

"Nebasmeal," I said and Alexander nodded.

"But what is he after? What does he gain by this?" Lucerne asked.

"He might be working in collusion with Tarkentower," Archer suggested.

"He clearly does not have good intentions," Alexander said. "We must stop him somehow."

"Will you join us on our venture to the north?" I asked. "We intend to find Tarkentower and his machine. Once we accomplish that, Nebasmeal should fall fast."

"I think my services would be better spent here, guarding the pass and protecting the Kingdom," he said. "You see, my wall not only keeps people out of the northern zone, it also prevents spies from moving into the Kingdom."

It had been a long ride to get here and we were exhausted. Seeing we were tired, Alexander sent us off to sleep. I didn't remember much of the night expect the howl of wolves in my dreams. It was as if they were calling out to me to run with wild them, across the hills in the moonlight, offering me a chance to forget about this world and all its problems for the rest of time. In the sky, when I looked up from the fields and howled, a star fluttered and went out. It reminded me that I needed to keep moving. I had a gift that could change everything.

In the morning I awoke to the smell of fresh pancakes and more hot cider. We ate without hesitation, filling ourselves to the brim.

We had a long way to go today and Tennyson wanted to embark right after we finished eating. Outside Alexander's house, as we were about to mount up on our horses, the sky suddenly flickered. I hadn't experienced a Star Burn in so long that I'd almost forgotten what they were like. I covered my eyes, but then spread my fingers apart a little so I could watch what was happening. The sky went from black to white and then black again, back and forth, as if someone was covering and uncovering a candle in the night in a hurry.

Mixed within the light I saw images. I strained to see farther into the sky as the whole universe flattened out above me, first the planets, and then distant stars, the whole galaxy appearing as close as our own sun. I saw the earth, although I was on the earth, and I saw images of events happening on the earth, yet they were out of sequence. One picture shocked me and I tried earnestly to bring it into focus. However, the Star Burn was not something I could control. I covered my eyes completely before the last big flash took place.

"What did you see?" Lucerne asked, concern on her face.

"Deon is in trouble," I said. "And so are King and Amelia. There are scavengers all around the house right now, coming in fast on every side. King has his shotgun out, ready for action, but they aren't intimidated this time."

"I saw the same thing," Tennyson said.

"I admit, I saw it too," Alexander said. "We are all connected in this somehow."

"We've got to return. We've got to help them!" Lucerne cried.

Tennyson put his hand on her shoulder and stopped her from mounting her horse. "It would take days to get there from here. And by then, it would be too late."

"Wait," Alexander said. "There may be a way."

He turned to the pack of wolves lounging by the house and called them to attention.

"How fast can your wolves run?" Tennyson asked. "It would still be too late."

"You know what to do?" Alexander asked, looking at me.

In a second, the wolves were gone. I'd sent them to the brick house in the countryside where we'd left our friends, friends who were now in desperate need of rescue.

"Bravo," Tennyson said and clapped his hands.

Archer looked just as stunned as when I'd made the blue crystal disappear.

"Can you see what's happening?" I asked.

"Yes. I can see through the eyes of the wolves. You'll have to let me concentrate, please. I don't actually tell each wolf what to do. That would be too exhausting. I send out a general order to the lead wolf and he organizes the others."

"What's going on there? Tell us," Lucerne pleaded.

"I've got the wolves running around the house now. The scavengers are a bit confused by that. They'll have to go through my wolves to get to your friends. No. Wait. The man defending the house is confused as well. He must think the wolves are working for the scavengers. What can I do? He's raising his gun. He wants to shoot us. We must retreat!"

"Give me a piece of paper," Tennyson demanded. "Anything I can write on!"

Archer fumbled with his backpack and pulled out a notebook. He rushed the papers over to Tennyson, his hands visibly shaking. He nearly tripped on the way. Tennyson grabbed what he could from the flailing scientist and started writing fast in big block letters.

"How do you spell Lucerne?" he shouted.

"L-U-C-," she blurted out but he cut her off with the shake of his head.

"THE WOLFES R UR FRIENDS. LEW AND LUC," he printed out and then yelled, "quick, Lewis, send this to King."

I didn't even take it out of his hand. The paper just vanished. I was getting pretty good at that. All eyes turned to look back at Alexander.

"Wait. I can't see anything. I need to get the wolves out of the fields and back to the front of the house. Wait. Wait. OK. King looks white as a ghost. There's the paper! I see it now. It's in his hand and he's trying to read it. OK, now he's nodding. And looking up at the sky. He's pointing the gun over the heads of the wolves. We're moving in again. We're circling the house. We're ready to attack!"

Moments passed. Alexander put his hands on his face, focusing fully on what he was seeing in his mind, blocking us out completely. We waited in silence, not daring to interrupt him. Then he relaxed and dropped his hands. He took a deep breath and sighed.

"I'm tired," was all he could say as he plopped down on a log.

"Is everything all right?" Lucerne asked, rushing over to him.

"I ran them off. They won't be back for a long time, I believe. Can I have my wolves back now?"

I bought them back, depositing them safely next to his house. Then I sat down as well. I'd never completed so many magical tasks in one setting before. I hadn't realized how much energy it required.

"I have to document this," Archer said, scribbling notes in his notebook. "If that's OK with you." He didn't wait for anyone to give him permission.

"Two magicians, working in tandem," Tennyson said and nodded his head. "Powerful stuff. If only we could convince you to go with us, Alexander."

"I understand your goals. But I have my wolves to consider. Now that we've merged our minds so often it wouldn't be easy for me to leave them behind."

"If we do have a problem, I could always send him a note, like we did with King," I said.

"Lewis, you never cease to amaze me. That's a great idea," Tennyson said and put his hand on my shoulder.

"Tell me more about this guild of magicians," Archer asked, pausing in his writing.

"Well, it's pretty new. And so far, there's just the two of us," Alexander said and managed a weak smile.

"'From humble beginnings, the order of magicians grew.' I shall write that down." And he wrote it down.

I shook Alexander's hand to mark the beginning of our friendship and the beginning of our order. I hated to say goodbye so soon, but I knew I'd be back to see him someday.

#  Burning Time

With the blue crystal wall firmly in place behind us, we were bound and determined to move forward. Whatever might be waiting for us in the northern zone would soon be within our grasp, for better or for worse.

Before mounting up on my horse, I went over to inspect the wall with Alexander one last time. He reached his hand out, running his fingers across the crystals. The wall began to glow, pulsing brighter and brighter.

"Touch it," he said. "It's like recharging your batteries."

I put my hand out and pressed it flat against the wall. Instantly I felt better, like I'd just woken up from a good sleep. Not too alert, yet not too groggy. The calibration on my system was perfect.

"How is it that you can touch blue crystal?" Archer asked, sitting on his horse with notepad in hand.

"Magicians draw power from it," Alexander explained.

"What happens if we touch it?"

"When most people try, they die rather horribly. The problem with touching blue crystal is that it will either kill you or make you stronger, but you won't know which, not until you've tried it. Is that a chance you're willing to take?"

"Today, I'll pass. But I am curious. Is it really organic inside?"

"Blue crystal isn't a stone in the typical sense. I mean, it wasn't formed by great pressure from deep inside the earth. This is more like petrified wood."

I suddenly knew exactly what he was talking about. I felt as if I could see inside the wall, mingling with its very nature. There was still life residing in the old tree it had come from. And I could take from that life until I had my fill.

"Does it come from this world or from another one, as the legends say?" Archer continued to write as he asked more questions.

"It's definitely not from this planet. There once were trees growing on another planet, a place which is merely dust floating throughout the galaxy now. The destruction of that planet began after the collision of two great stars. Whenever the trees on that planet died, they became petrified as material from the surface of the planet flowed into them. I can't say whether the original trees are the source of our power or if the unique combination of the particular elements entering the wood made the blue crystal what it is today. Regardless of its history, blue crystal is here on this earth to stay."

"How did you first know you could touch it?" I asked Alexander.

"I discovered that by accident. There was a sample in the lab down in the Kingdom. It was kept highly secret and under constant guard, of course. People there are afraid of the littlest things. One day the jar fell off the table and broke and I just happened to be walking by. The stuff stuck to me like a magnet. Nobody would willingly touch blue crystal for the first time."

"Well," Archer exclaimed. "This is news to me."

"Once Nebasmeal discovered I had come in contact with blue crystal and lived, he started proceedings to have me cast out. I was deemed a threat and barely escaped with my life."

"He is more treacherous than we first imagined," Tennyson said. "I will have to do something about that when I return."

"And I would be in your debt if you could," Alexander said and bowed.

"I still can't figure out how he knew so much about me," I said.

"Technology," Archer replied. "They must have discovered the trace I was doing in the computer lab about your family history. I thought I had gotten away with it. I must confess I put everyone in danger."

"You had good intentions," I said. "The information you provided us with was worth the risk."

"We all share responsibility for the future of this earth," Tennyson said. "Now let's go and see if we can put an end to this madness."

With that we mounted up, said goodbye, and began our journey down the mountain.

The trail followed a ridge-line as it descended toward the river valley below. It took us nearly all day to reach the bottom, due to the slow progress our horses made. In some places the path was so steep we had to dismount and walk, holding onto the reins for fear of sliding.

Although we hadn't gone far from the mountain pass, when we arrived at the river, we decided to build a camp and dine on fresh fish before turning in for the night. Archer knew more about cooking than any of us, but Tennyson knew the most about how to catch a fish. Lucerne and I put together the campsite and then we sat down to eat. Under the moonlight we gathered around the fire and told tall stories about faraway places and strange happenings, things we'd never really witnessed before.

In the morning, after crossing the river on horseback, we ascended the next mountain range, this one not as high. At the top of this new ridge we could see far to the north.

The land dropped a little from here, forming a vast plain that stretched out until it touched the horizon. The plain was almost empty. A thick dark smoke rose from the land as if the soil itself had once been on fire.

We sat upon our horses, looking out across this vast wasteland and pondering the best way to cross it. There seemed to be no clear trail anymore and yet the chances of getting lost were slim, due to the openness of the land. Still, something didn't feel right. I frowned and told my misgivings to Tennyson and he nodded in agreement.

In the end, there wasn't much choice. Going around might be less dangerous, but no one knew how long that would take. We finally decided to risk it all and push straight on ahead.

From where we sat we could feel the warmth on the plain below and we took off our robes and wore only our lightest underclothes. Tennyson took some spare bed cloth out of a bag and cut it into small squares. He tied pieces of the cloth around the hooves of each horse, making a temporary shoe to protect them from the heat coming up from the ground.

The descent down the shallow hillside went slowly. I leaned back in my saddle as my horse tested each step forward. I encouraged the horse to take its time, as falling off now might be the end of me. The plain at the bottom was covered in an ash-colored sand. It looked as if someone had burned down a giant forest and spread the smoldering remains across the land.

Tennyson cautioned us not to give in to the urge to drink too much water as we set out.

...Tennyson cautioned us not to give in to the urge to drink too much water as we set out...

...Tennyson cautioned us not to give in to the urge to drink too much water as we set out...

...Tennyson cautioned us not to give in to the urge to drink too much water as we set out...

"No!" I screamed and looked around.

We had just entered the burning desert for the fifth time. Lucerne looked up at me in surprise. Then we entered the burning desert again.

"No!" I screamed again and stopped my horse.

"What is it?" Tennyson asked. "Is there some danger here we don't see here?"

"No!" I screamed again.

"What is it?" Tennyson asked.

I willed myself out of the time loop and deposited all the horses on solid ground at the top of the ridge we'd come over. From there we stood little chance of wandering into the burning desert again. Tennyson looked over at Archer and Archer returned an empty stare, both men equally dazed.

"Do I know you?" Lucerne asked as she peered into my eyes. "Why am I so hungry?"

"Wait a minute and you'll remember," I said. "It wasn't that long ago."

"Hey, stranger, need some help?" Tennyson pulled his horse up next to mine.

He looked at me and frowned, a mixture of confusion and old age smeared across his face. Then he took in Lucerne and Archer. He studied the horses as well. Then he looked back the way we'd come, down toward the river valley behind us. Then he glanced once more out across the burning lands.

Thoughts of who I was were slowly flooding back into my head. I tried to block the memory of the time loop out of my mind, but a wave of nausea hit me hard right in the stomach and I vomited on the ground next to my horse.

It was the first time I'd moved people through time and space, as far as I knew. The transportation of the wolves had left me feeling weak, but this kicked the desire to live another moment right out of me.

"Not going that way, are we?" Tennyson asked, still looking a bit unsure of himself.

"There's a time loop there. It's set on infinite repeat. We'll have to go around," I explained.

"I feel like I've been sucked into a black hole and spit back out again," Archer murmured.

After resting a bit and reintroducing ourselves to each other repeatedly, during which time we began to feel more comfortable with who we were, and less hungry, we went back down to the burning desert. This time, however, we skirted the region in question and traveled northwest along the remote edge.

There wasn't much of a path here. It looked like no one had ever passed this way before. Between the burning land on our right and the trees on the hill to our left was a narrow swath we could just pass through, if we were careful. We had to push our horses forward, sometimes on foot. Whenever the air grew too hot, we retreated back up the hillside where we rested and drank from our water flasks as we sat under the trees.

The hills were following a curve. I could tell we were circling something rather slowly. Yet there was no way to get inside the circle and see what was at the heart of it. We were constantly pursuing a point somewhere just past the next stretch of sand on the horizon. Or the next one after that. And time was dragging.

This went on all day with little chatter between us. I slipped off into a light sleep more than once, only to be awoken feeling like I'd been here before. Each time it happened I panicked, thinking we were stuck in a time loop again. I wrapped my arms around myself and tried not to vomit.

The sun finally dropped lower in the sky. That's when I noticed something different up ahead. There appeared to be a river flowing into the burning lands. We reached it soon after and stopped to rest and consider our next move.

In a way, we were trapped. There was no way to cross the river, because it was too deep and too swift for our horses. There was no way to cross the burning lands. And at the same time, there was no sense in turning around and going back the way we'd come. Everything seemed so fruitless.

The more I sat there, the more I had the painful sensation that the sun was cooking the inside of my head. And yet it made me giggle. Archer sat on the ground near the water and I couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. He gazed idly downstream, letting his horse rest in the shade of a grove of trees just up the hill.

I shook my water bottle and it sounded empty. Emptiness had a curious sound to it and I wanted to climb inside my bottle and see what was in there. After testing the river upstream, Tennyson determined it was safe for us to drink from there, a place where the water wasn't so hot. But being the least agile in the group, I dropped my bottle in the water, top still on, and it floated downstream to where Archer sat. He reached out with a stick and pulled it back to shore.

"We go under it," he said suddenly.

"We do what?" I asked.

"Let me try an experiment," he said, standing up and brushing the dust off his pants. "Be a good student of the ways of science and describe to me what you see."

He picked up the stick he had used to catch my bottle and threw it out into the middle of the river. It floated peacefully, turning a little this way and that in the current, as it moved off into the region of the burning lands. It was peaceful to watch. Deep inside I wished it good luck. From what I could tell, it continued downstream without incident, until I could see it no more.

"And what did you see?" Archer asked.

"I saw a stick floating away on the river?" I asked, wondering if the question was a trick and I'd missed something.

"Did you see the stick floating away and returning and floating away again?"

"No," I answered.

"And do you think if we threw ourselves into the river, just like that stick, we'd have a good chance of floating away, too?"

I gave it some thought. If there was a time loop in the river, we wouldn't see it from here. It wouldn't be like when you watched a movie and the film got stuck, repeating the same scene over and over. The stick would appear to float away just like it should. Being on a different fork in time, we would see it disappear on the horizon and nothing more. Since we were not a part of the time loop that might exist in the river, the light reflected off the stick again and again as it receded over and over would never arrive where we stood. Archer's test hadn't reveal a glitch in the mechanics of time and I told him so.

"The stick isn't proof," Tennyson confirmed, after listening to me.

Archer nodded. "Well done. You might be a better student of science than I am at times," he said and sighed. "It was worth a try."

"Is there any way you can use magic to get past the time loop?" Lucerne asked. "You got us out of it."

"I don't think so," I said. "I have to see where I want to be next, if I am to transport myself anywhere."

"Since he's never been across the burning lands, he can't take us there," Archer explained to her.

With nothing better to do, we decide to make camp for the night. We walked a little up the hillside and found a level patch of land where we set up our tents and cooking utensils. Tennyson tried to catch a fish, but this time had no luck. Instead, we dined on hard biscuits from Alexander's house and drank warm water. In the dark dead night as the fire burned brightly we sat around and tried to sing songs. Tennyson had the most musical talent, but without much motivation his tune fell flat.

I turned my back to the fire and lay down with my head near the flames. As I looked up at the stars in the night sky, glowing ashes spiraled heavenward and away toward oblivion. Now caught up in the winds, they weaved between the interspersed lights of distant stars. The world felt like it had gone wobbly on its perch for a moment in time and I shook my head. Then I thought of a possibility we'd overlooked in our earlier analysis of the situation.

"I go first," I said, taking a breath and letting it out slowly so my head would clear.

"What do you mean?" Archer asked.

"I'll swim downstream in the river first. If there is a time loop, I'm the only one who will be able to recognize it. And I'm the only one who can break out of it."

"And then what happens when you reach the other side of the burning lands?" Archer asked.

"I'll send a message back to you and you can follow me. 'JUMP IN' it will say. Or something like that. Anyway, you'll know what I mean."

"Still, it's risky," Tennyson said. "How can we be sure that you won't end up at the bottom of the river like an over-cooked fish?"

"Well," I said, pausing to consider my choices. "If I never come back, then you'll just have to find another way to continue onward without me."

"I don't know about that," Lucerne said.

"It's a chance I'm willing to take," I said.

"It might work," Archer said.

"It's too late at night to try anything now," Tennyson said. "Let's sleep on it and decide in the morning.

When the sun came up, we talked about this new plan one more time. As time was dragging by, and we all wanted to move on, we decided to go for it. I refilled my water bottle upstream and then found a safe looking spot on the riverbank near to the burning lands. After taking off my shoes and putting them in my backpack, I dipped a toe in the river to test the water.

"How is it?" Lucerne asked.

"A little hotter than I'd prefer," I said.

"You be safe," she said and hugged me.

Before things got too emotional, I jumped in. I hit the bottom sooner than expected. It was muddy and warm, like sticking your foot in soft clay at the deep end of a hot spring. I kicked a time or two and bobbed back up to the surface of the river. Already, I was moving swiftly away from everyone.

I pushed my backpack under my chest and wrapped my arms around it, using it to stay afloat, occasionally kicking my feet whenever I felt like I might be spinning around and losing sight of where I was going. There was no way to wave goodbye to anyone in this position and soon I wondered how long ago they had vanished behind me.

The day drew on and my skin turned red from the heat of the river. I sensed little change in time with the monotony of swimming endlessly downstream. I was pretty sure I wasn't stuck in a loop, since I didn't feel nauseous. Still, there was no way to judge my progress.

Everything was changing so slowly. All I could see were the two sandy riverbanks on both sides and an endless carpet of water flowing onward in front of me. If I was doomed to repeat this float down the river forever, I would probably go insane.

After what might have been several hours, or days, I noticed the ash-colored sand along the riverside now had scraggly tufts of grass growing in it. Then the sand disappeared altogether as the green stuff took over. I kicked with my feet and moved away from the middle of the river. At the shore I climbed out and pulled myself up to the top of the riverbank. My muscles were so soft from the warm water that I could barely keep from sliding down the riverbank and into the water again.

Once I'd sat and rested for a while, staring mindlessly at my feet, I turned and looked upstream. The desert stretched out unbroken and meaningless in the direction I'd come from, giving no clue as to how far away my friends might be. At the very least, I was convinced the way was safe and there was no repeating time loop embedded in the landscape anywhere behind me.

I turned downstream to see what lay ahead and stopped short. Across a perfectly cut lawn were row upon row of houses. Each one was in mint condition, as if they'd all just been built this morning. These weren't the traditional brick and clay houses found in the Kingdom. They were made of wood, and freshly painted, shining brightly in the sun, as if the paint was still wet. They might have been copied right out of a real estate magazine advertising pristine homes for sale in the country.

Before venturing closer, I scribbled a short message on a piece of paper and made it disappear. Then I waited for everyone to arrive.

These eerie houses weren't occupied, as far as I could see. At least, no one came out of them. The tinted windows glistened in the sun, making it difficult to look inside them from this distance. I wasn't ready to go closer to them until my friends were here.

When no one climbed out of the water after a couple hours, I wondered if I'd spelled everything on the note correctly. With nothing better to do, I closed my eyes and took a nap. When I awoke, there were several pages out of a notebook clenched in my fist. I looked at them closely in utter shock. Without a doubt these were the exact same pages torn out of Amelia's notebook long ago, the ones Tennyson had told me to send to eternity when we were at the gas station.

"Is this heaven?" I whispered to the wind, but heard no response.

Night came and still I waited. I gathered some dry grass and driftwood from the river's edge and lit a small fire, in case someone passed by in the river in the dark. In the morning, there was still no sign of them. Half a day later, I got tired of waiting. Since I knew what this place looked like, I could always come back. I transported myself to the camp by the river where I had last seen my friends.

The horses were still there, munching peacefully on grass, free to wander away if they desired, but I found no sign of anyone. Their packs and water bottles had also vanished. Even my note was nowhere to be found. It was starting to scare me.

I sat and thought about it for a while, doing my best to reason things out. Assuming they'd waited here until they found my note, where had they gone? Why hadn't they jumped into the river as planned and followed me downstream?

I asked the horses these questions but received blank stares. It left me feeling confused and frayed inside my mind. With few other options, I put myself back on the other side of the burning lands, near the row of sparkling new houses.

I sat there for the rest of the day, waiting by the river, wondering if this was the end of my life. I might just sit here forever and never know what had gone wrong. Eventually I heard the sound of Tennyson cursing as he climbed out of the water. Lucerne and Archer followed him a moment later.

"What happened?" I asked, exasperated.

"What happened to you?" Tennyson demanded.

"We waited for three days for your note," Lucerne explained. "We were running out of supplies and almost gave up. It made me sick to thick you'd died in the river somehow."

"When your note came through, I couldn't believe it," Tennyson said. "I jumped in the river first. Yet it only took me half a day to get here."

"I waited here a long time as well. I even went back to find you, but you weren't there," I confessed.

"All roads lead to Rome," Archer said and plopped down next to me, wriggling his wet toes in the grass.

"What do you mean?" Lucerne asked as she combed her long hair in the sun with her fingers.

"Time may travel down many different paths, but in the end, it all has to balance out. Time can't just stop, you know. Eventually, we would all meet up again in the same time frame."

"What?" I asked.

"We waited for you and you waited for us. Somehow, though, the river brought us all here in only a small amount of time."

"How are the horses?" Tennyson asked.

"Oh, they're fine. When I left they were chewing on the grass just like always. Probably thought we'd be back at any moment. They're good horses."

"Take a look at that," Lucerne said, pointing at the houses across the lawn.

At least she confirmed I wasn't the only one who could see them. This wasn't just my own version of paradise. I showed Tennyson the pages from Amelia's notebook.

"How did those get here? I thought I told you to send them to the end of time."

"I did. I think we are now in a place where time comes to an end."

"Is that possible?" Lucerne asked, looking at Archer, who only shrugged his shoulders.

"There is only one way to know. Let's go check it out," Tennyson said

We got up and walked across the lawn to the nearest home.

"They look real enough," Archer said, tapping on the glass in one of the windows.

I wanted to mimic his confidence, but stayed close behind Lucerne as she led us around the corner. From there we were greeted by an empty street. Everything around us appeared to be in perfect condition, yet no one was here to look after anything. It just didn't make any sense.

Lucerne continued to lead the way and Tennyson occasionally scanned the yards behind us, but no sign of danger materialized in either direction.

"She was born for this," I said, pointing out Lucerne's methodical progress as she went from home to home.

"I can see that," Tennyson said.

"I think you should promote her to ranger," I continued.

She turned to me and smiled. "I second that."

At that moment, something moved. I sensed it without seeing it. It was like something had altered its composition just around the corner of the house we were passing. Or maybe it was more like the shadow of something in motion. Lucerne picked up the alarm in my eyes and spun around, ready to fight.

A little green man about the height of a tricycle stepped out from around the corner, humming a simple tune and staring mindlessly up into the sky, twiddling his fingers. Upon noticing us, he turned and ran across the lawn. He was in a hurry to get somewhere and our presence seemed to frighten him. Lucerne ran after him. She caught him off guard and grabbed him by the shoulder and spun around, launching him high into the air.

He hit the ground with a soft crunch. Then he sprang back on his feet, uninjured. He took a look at each of us closely while brushing his small shoulders off. And then he split into three versions of himself. These variations also subdivided into other variations. Everywhere, copies of him were multiplying faster than I could count. And then we were surrounded by little green men on every side. As we tried to advance, they continued to divide and get in our way. We were trapped.

Somehow, this whole scene felt strangely familiar, as if I'd been here before.

#  Tarkentower

Little green men were no longer multiplying, but now they emerged from the landscape. Not only were they were coming from around corners and out of windows, they even appeared to be stepping out of the sides of the houses. The image of one grew next to me, similar in consistency to the texture of the wall, and then the image began to move and take on depth as it expanded in three dimensions, until finally a little green man stepped out of the woodwork and shook himself in the sunlight.

By now, we were surrounded by thousands of them, hemming us in on every side. They looked at us with expressions of awe. They were soft and pudgy and made little noises of contentment, and occasionally they nudged each other with their heads, and if they'd had tails, I'm sure they'd have been wagging them. When the wind blew they swayed from side to side and smiled at us as if they were all just a bit high.

"Take us to your leader?" I asked.

"We fear our leader," they said in unison.

"Now stop that, before you drive me crazy," Lucerne demanded. "Don't everyone speak at the same time."

"Who can represent you?" Tennyson asked.

"You can represent us," they said altogether.

A few in the front row flinched when Lucerne kicked at the air above their heads.

"Who?" she asked. "Pick somebody to speak for you. Or I will."

They turned away from us for a moment, forming hundreds of tightly closed circles by linking their hands over each others shoulders. We heard a humming rise up in soft tones and then they nodded in unison and came out of their huddles, dropping their hands and turning to look at us through big soft eyes. One particular little green man was pushed forward through the crowd. He didn't look like he really wanted be in the position of representing everyone in his community. But they made him advance and soon he was standing before us.

"I. Can." He spoke unevenly, his voice cracking on every word. "Speak. For. Everybody."

I bent down on one knee in front of him and looked at him squarely.

"You're a brave little fellow," I said, tapping him on the chest. "So speak your mind."

The little man stood up a little taller, smiling, swaying from side to side.

"We. Seek. An. Alliance," he said and a cheer went up all around us.

Lucerne motioned for them to quiet down.

"And what would you like us to do for you?" Tennyson asked.

"We-are. Trapped-here. By. Our. Master. Can-you. Help-us. Be. Free?"

"First," I said, "we will meet with your master face to face and see if there is a peaceful solution. Second, we will defeat him if he isn't willing to listen. But either way, in the end, you will be free."

Another cheer passed through the crowd. The little green men formed small circles again like players on a football field, huddled tight, with hands on shoulders. They stayed that way awhile and we listened as they hummed, waiting for them to give us a response. Then they split up and formed ranks. A call went out and they marched in unison down the street in front of us. The spokesman came up to us, stepping in time with his companions, and waved for us to follow along.

We were midway down the street in the midst of this unusual parade when suddenly they stopped. Without warning they began to disappear. They merged into the environment as easily as they had come out of it, each one taking on the shape of the object nearest to him. It was like they could slip inside things, the street curb, the lawn, the street itself. I had no idea how they were doing it. And then, in one wink, they were all gone.

In the middle of the empty street stood a man. He was tall and his hair was white and so was his beard, white as fresh snow. He wore a white suit and carried a white cane, which he kept pinned under his arm because he had little use for it.

It was the legend come to life. Here was Dr. Tarkentower at last. This is where it would all happen. I would change the world today. I was sure of it.

"Care for some lunch?" he asked, all too politely.

"Stay back!" Lucerne demanded and positioned herself to fight.

Tarkentower ignored her intimidating stance. "You look really hungry."

A curious feeling of hunger crept over me and I realized we hadn't had a solid meal to eat in days. The idea of sitting down with him was appealing for reasons I couldn't explain. I caught myself nodding my head and then I stopped. I hadn't expected him to be so accommodating.

"Where are we? How can this place exist?" Archer asked, a hand up in the air, as if he were a student asking a question in a classroom.

"I think you know where you are. And you know why you're here. Otherwise, you wouldn't have come so far, not without a purpose in mind. This is no chance meeting. As for an introduction, you may call me Dr. Tarkentower."

"We know where we are. That's true," I said. "And we know who you are. But are you so sure you know why we came here?"

"An impressive response for such a clumsy little boy," he said and mocked me with a silly bow. "Now why don't we all sit down together and have a bite to eat? After that, you can hear my side of the story. I'm really not as bad a person as you think I am."

Suddenly I felt like he might be a nice person to get to know. Then I shook it off. He was a master at choosing his words and throwing his voice inside my head. I rubbed my temples and cleared my thoughts, focusing on our objective. We were here to set this world back on its natural course. It was about time that his monstrous machine be shut down forever.

He walked over to an empty wall on the side of a house and motioned for us to follow. When he tapped on the wall with his cane a door appeared out of nowhere. We followed him into the doorway and down a long white hall that opened into a room with a white table in the middle. The walls here were also white, and so was everything else in the room. Even the utensils on the table were white. In the air was the hint of antiseptic vapor like they use in a hospital.

"We hadn't expected to meet you on friendly terms," Lucerne began after we'd all sat down together, exchanging nods and smiles, and then abruptly she cut herself off.

"If you like to think of this as heaven, well, in a way it is. It's my version of heaven," Tarkentower said and picked up a white spoon and tapped the side of a white tea cup resting on a white saucer. A chime rang out, starting as a whisper and then growing in energy like a legion of angels singing in perfect harmony.

"But why did you do it?" Lucerne asked.

"Why not?"

"No, really, tell us why," Tennyson insisted.

"I was a doctor," he explained. "I'd grown tired of seeing so many people die. The world was getting worse and worse. It was growing more and more crowded every day and there was nothing anybody could do about it. On any given shift I would treat as many people for gunshot wounds as I would for cancer. There was no end to it. There was no simple solution. That's when I started looking for complicated answers to a complicated problem. That's when I discovered my real genius. I realized I could make the world a better place for everybody."

A little green man walked in through a door opposite the one we'd used. He carried a white tray and on it fruit, colorful fruit, so colorful against all that white that I couldn't take my eyes off it. I forgot for a moment where I was. The little man put the tray down, made a stiff bow, and then turned to go.

"How did you do it?" Archer asked.

Tarkentower pulled a black box from his jacket pocket and pushed a button. The little man froze in place. "Imagine, instead of little green men, I want little blue men." He pushed another button. The little green man, stuck in mid-stride, changed into a little blue man. Tarkentower pushed another button and the little blue man unfroze and quickly shuffled out of the room.

"How is that possible?" Archer asked, emerging from his chair in disbelief.

"Science did that, my friend, pure science. Before now, we were floating down a river in time where all the little men in service were green. After I made a small adjustment, we switched directions, following a different fork in the river. In this universe, all the little men working here are blue."

"Those little dog-bots you used to protect the hospital didn't work out so well, did they?" I asked.

"How did you know about...?" he started. Then he ignored me and picked up an apple and took a bite.

"And what about the natural order of things?" I continued. "Haven't you just broken the one of the most basic laws of the universe? You've altered time. Won't that destroy the future?"

"Don't be fooled by the way you think things work, stupid child. Everything you know about time shall be corrected today with just a few simple lessons," he said and stood up, tapping the floor with his cane.

"You have no right to change the course of events in our lives. What makes you think you can do whatever you feel like with the world around you? What about the rights of other people?" Lucerne demanded.

"If you knew you could improve your life, wouldn't you do it? If you were sick, you'd go to the doctor for medicine, right, my dear? All I've done here is merely found a better way to live, not only for myself, but also for the rest of the world. I've fixed this planet once and forever," he exclaimed, his voice growing a little heated.

"You're being selfish," she continued. "You're changing the very fabric of time to meet your own needs. Meanwhile, you're destroying the future of countless others."

"We all have to be a little selfish at times. I only did what I did to create hope for the future. By being selfish, by wanting to make my life better, I created a world where everyone could benefit."

"It was your wife, wasn't it?" I asked. "She died and that drove you crazy."

"True, I had a wife once. She perished in a long line of cars stuck on the highway. All she needed was a little help and she would have outlived everyone, including me. But the traffic had stopped moving and there was no way I could get to her in time. It drove me to create a machine unlike any other, so that no one would ever have to suffer as much as I did on that day when I lost her."

"And what about the natural order of the universe?" I repeated. "Do you realize your machine is destroying the old earth and everyone on it?"

"There you go again, talking about the natural order of things!" he said and threw his hands up in the air. "I wish you'd quit saying that, you persistent worm. It's really an irrelevant line of reasoning."

"What about the people coming through the loop who are mentally unstable because of the repetition of their lives?" I asked. "You have no clue about what's really going, do you? Your machine, your science, it has culminated in bringing about the end of the natural world."

He looked like he actually believed me for a moment. Then he scowled and said, "Science is the only way forward. Without science, we are all lost."

"Then what about magic?" Tennyson asked, exhibiting a dark smile.

"There is no magic here. If you think magic is real, if you think it's more powerful than science, then show me this magic. I'm waiting."

I almost let him in for the biggest surprise of his life, but then decided to throw him another argument. "What about blue crystal?" I asked. "That's destroying countless lives. How do you plan to fix that?"

"Whatever. It's of no consequence. Call it the natural order, if you will."

"We demand that you shut down your machine now," Tennyson commanded and stood up, his eyes on fire.

I'd never seen him so angry before. But just negotiating with words was getting us nowhere. I knew I had to act soon.

"Let me put it in simple terms," Tarkentower said, tapping the table with his fingers. "Today, we are playing a game of chess. I have made my move. Now you are here to make yours. The only difference is I am genius. I have foreseen every possible move you can make and I feel obligated to inform you that you cannot win. Save your energy for something realistic."

"While I applaud your genius, I still have to question your dismissal of the possibility of magic," Archer said.

"And why exactly is that?" he asked. "I thought we'd settled that already."

"Here, in the code for your machine, read line 42." Archer pulled a stack of ruffled papers from his backpack and waved them at Tarkentower. "And then again, look at line 91. You clearly programmed in countermeasures for the intrusion of magic."

"Where did you get those?" Tarkentower asked, trying to grab the papers out of Archer's hand.

"We traced the access port your machine has to the satellites and I grabbed a packet of the original program without your knowledge. It says here that the Brothers Kuo, ancient stone warriors from the East, will be deployed to attack and kill any person who possesses the gift of magic on this future earth. Anyone who could, at any time, and here I stress the word time, bring about the destruction of your invention."

Tarkentower flipped through the pages. "I see the similarity in this coding to my own handiwork. It even strikes at the level of genius I posses. Yes, it has my signature, but I have no memory of every creating such a subroutine."

"Are you even insane?" Tennyson asked, looking him directly in the eyes. "And how would you know?"

"Of course I'm sane! I'm in the prime of my life. I have full possession of all my senses and I control all that I see around me. I know everything in this room is real and not just a figment of my imagination. How much saner could a person be?" he shouted, visibly shaken this time.

"Magic is very real," I said. "And you've forgotten who you are. You've gone down so many different rivers that you no longer remember where you started."

"Look here, you pointless blip on the map of nonexistence, I'll just send you and your friends all back to where you came from and then you can think about what you're saying for a good long time. And here, I also emphasize the word time."

He reached for the remote control he'd left lying on the table, but just then it disappeared. A second later in was sitting in front of Archer. Tarkentower, shaken and pale, jumped up and dove across the table, but before he could grab it, it moved through time and space once more, now resting in front of Tennyson.

"Who's doing this? How have you have copied my technology? Where are you hiding your controller?" he barked. "You may have downloaded my code, but there's no way you can possess the genius to use it."

"You may be a genius, but like anyone, you're also capable of forgetting things. Or possibly you are just blocking them out of your mind because of the pain," Archer said.

Tennyson pointed at me. "This boy, Lewis, he possesses the gift of magic. We have clearly demonstrated that to you. And yet you refuse to believe us."

Tarkentower made one more jump for the remote, but it appeared in my hand this time. I was getting a big kick out of playing this game of cat and mouse with him. Just that fast, Lucerne grabbed the remote and smashed it on the side of the table. Parts went flying everywhere.

"What have you done?" Tarkentower screamed.

"What have I done?" she mimicked. "I've broken your little toy."

"You people are mad! You play these tricks on me and expect me to fall for your lunacy? This is my universe. This is my heaven. This is my natural order, if you prefer those terms. I will not permit you to bring chaos into this realm!"

He ran for the door but halfway across the room a chair materialized in front of him. Too late to stop, he tripped over it, crashing down on the floor. He rolled over and sat up, clutching his leg. On his white pants just below the knee appeared a crimson splash of blood.

"Pain!" he yelled and wiped the tears away from his eyes. "I'd forgotten all about pain until you brought it here."

Tarkentower might have been a genius, but he hadn't seen that coming. It was possible he had played out this exact scene before, just like in a game of chess, by altering time, but we were now on a road where magic made a difference.

Before he could get up, the doors swung open on both sides of the room. Little blue men rushed in, filling up the space, until there was no way any more of them could enter. Their elected leader, the one who had been bold enough to talk to us, climbed up on a chair and jumped on the table. He picked up an apple and bit into it, then spit it out, just missing Tarkentower.

"The master of time has been defeated!" he declared.

A cheer went up. The little blue men who had been little green men patted each other on the back. Tarkentower was clearly more confused than anyone. Possibly Tennyson was right and the man had gone insane. He'd become a victim of his own hubris.

In the middle of the celebration, he attempted to stand up, favoring his good leg, his cane still by the table. He motioned for everyone to be quiet. However, his black control box was scattered in pieces across the floor and none of the little blue men paid him any attention anymore.

"We rule," the blue leader on the table shouted, looking more confident by the minute. He threw the apple at Tarkentower and hit him on the head.

"Listen. Listen!" Tarkentower yelled above the crowd. "I admit this hasn't been the most beneficial experience for everyone present here today. But believe me, with my machine, I can grant everyone your deepest desires. I can make whatever you want into reality."

He indicated us, and not the little blue men, as he swung his arm in our direction. It was pointless. The little blue men wanted nothing more than to live independently of his menacing control. And we would settle for nothing less than returning the world to a course in time in which everyone was free to do whatever they wanted, without being manipulated.

"There is only one road forward that is acceptable," Tennyson said. "You must unplug your machine."

"Yes, we can discuss this option over time. Yes, of course. I am a reasonable man. I'm not the bad guy here. Just follow me and I'll take you there now," he said and motioned for the little blue men to get out of the way.

They rushed around in pure madness, destroying everything they could in the room, before running down the hallway and back out into the street. I heard windows smashing and boards creaking and then a huge boom as if they'd topple over an entire house. As the noise faded, we followed Tarkentower down a long hallway toward his lab.

The machine sat working quietly, displaying a list of names of the individuals who would pass through the worm hole in the next Star Burn, which was due at any moment now. Wires and panels moved and adjusted constantly on all side of the machine, like a giant clock calibrated by each moment in time. It was a magnificent design, yet a painful reminder of why were here.

"Freedom, that's what I want," I said. "Freedom for everyone."

"The problem is," Tarkentower replied, turning to face us, "you just can't unplug it. Believe me. I'm not trying to stop you anymore. You have to understand that the ramifications of turning this machine off right now would be certain death to billions of people who are still living in the old world. Death, because they would never escape the loop. Are you prepared to accept that responsibility?"

"We can always reprogram its subroutines," Archer said and sat down at the keyboard. "We can divert the course of time and put the planet back on the path where it belongs."

"Are you genius enough to do that? Now that you're in the driver's seat, the pressure is on you. Yes, I admit, my plan wasn't perfect. But if I'd let the world run its course, the way things were going, the way you want it to go, we wouldn't be standing here today. It was highly possible in that future that people would have destroyed the world. Like it or not, I saved your lives."

Tarkentower made a move as if he wanted to stop Archer, but Lucerne stepped in his way.

Archer tapped away at the keyboard as we watched, determined to find a way to restructure Tarkentower's careful programming. His fingers flew over the keys faster than I could follow them with my eyes. He managed to interrupt the next Star Burn by putting that routine into sleep mode. Then he jumped through lines and lines of code, referring to the pages in his notebook as he searched for a way to fix the future for everyone.

Tarkentower sat down in a chair next to him, wincing as he rested his bad knee. He peered over Archer's shoulder as he worked, mumbling into his ear something about the folly of his efforts. Archer brushed him away with the wave of a hand and continued to modify code.

"We can reroute the old earth through time," he said at last, pushing back his chair. "We can let it continue in the direction it should have gone, before the time loop began. Unfortunately, I see no way to link that world to this one. It's just too complex an operation. We will have to take a different path from everybody else."

"A good start," Tennyson said and I nodded.

"But then we'll be cut off from ever returning," Lucerne objected. "We'll never be able to see our families again."

"We already are cut off. We always have been. There never was a way of going back, once I turned on this machine," Tarkentower explained.

"How could you do that! How could you take me away from my family?" she pleaded, tears nearly spilling out of her eyes.

"I knew at the time it was a permanent decision, yet it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. I'm sorry, my friends, but you are the first real people I've had a chance to discuss this with since I put those events in order. My whole focus has been on trying to save the human race. Is it really so bad to make the world a better place?"

"You've only been avoiding your own pain," she said to him. "Pain steers us to make wiser decisions."

"I thought I was making a wiser decision," Tarkentower pleaded. "Remember, I lost my wife. Don't you think that hurt?"

He looked as uncertain as she was. Finally we were getting through to him.

"I think we're ready," Archer said, a finger positioned to strike at the keyboard. "My coding is simple, but it should do the trick. Just say the word and I'll send the old world on its way."

"Do it!" Lucerne blurted out, then pushed his hand down.

We waited. But nothing happened. The computer continued to hum as it had before. Lucerne looked over at me and wiped her eyes. As she opened her mouth to speak, she was shaking, but no words came out. Whatever she'd left behind in the old world, it was tearing her apart. Never going back had cut so deep she couldn't control herself anymore.

I nearly broke down as well. It hurt to see her in so much pain. Pain might help us make better decisions, but right now, I hated the lessons we were learning. I wanted to make it all disappear. I wanted to stop time itself. I almost wished the world would cease to be. Then I paused on the brink of ending it all.

The machine shifted shape and the monitor stopped displaying new tasks. I let out a sigh of relief. Things had changed. We had made a difference. It might take time to get this world back on the correct course, but taking the time to do things the right way seemed like a great ideal to me now.

"That's it," Archer said. "Billions of people will wake up in the morning to a whole new day." He tapped the side of the monitor with satisfaction.

"What should we do about Tarkentower's machine?" I asked.

"Until we understand it better, I think I should stay here and study it," Archer said. "There's a lot we can learn from it."

"Good idea," Tennyson said. "We'll need someone to help guard this room. I think there are plenty of suitable volunteers willing and ready to do the job right outside the door."

"Where are we going now?" Lucerne asked in a whisper. "What's going to happen next?"

"We'll deliver Tarkentower to the Council and prove he exists. That should clear my name. And as promised, you'll receive your invitation to join the ranger academy. I think you've earned it."

She sighed. "You're serious?"

"Serious," he said.

"I'm not sure if I'm ready to return to the Kingdom." I still had the urge to explore the world and look for other people like myself, people with similar gifts.

Archer said, "Why not get in contact with Alexander and tell him he can take down his wall now? The pass should be safe with Tarkentower under constant watch."

What he said made sense and I nodded. Finally, the world would be free. Even so, little did I know at the time how difficult it was going to be to create a sense of order on this future earth without sacrificing so much freedom.

"I'll miss you, Lewis," Lucerne said. "Be sure to visit." She was shining again, her future back in focus, her past behind her.

"I will," I said. With everyone watching us, I refrained from kissing her. Instead, I leaned over to give her a hug. "I won't be far," I whispered in her ear. Then I kissed her anyway.

With that settled we prepared to depart. While we were discussing the best way across the burning lands, Tarkentower slipped out of the room and was never seen again. We had no idea where to search, so we looked all over this timeless realm for him. The little blue men were great at tearing things apart and soon enough the rows of quaint houses had been churned into nothing more than a sore spot on the map. Yet Tarkentower was nowhere to be found.

That story all began when Tennyson yelled, "Where's Tarkentower?"

# Your Turn

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# About The Author

Daniel Scott White received his BA at Columbia College in Chicago and his MBA at National Taiwan University. He is the editor-in-chief at Longshot Press, which runs two imprints, Longshot Island and Unfit Magazine. While his expertise is in business, his passion is in writing. He was born in the mountains but now lives by the sea. He writes from the land of words.

Find out more at:

thelandofwords.com

# History

This book has been through many revisions, going all the way back to 2010. The real story began when I was younger, in my teenage years, when I first thought of the idea. Along the way, since then, the path to becoming an author has taken me all over the world of publishing. I'm proud of the way this book now stands. And I think you'll like it too.

Imagine a future where the earth isn't so crowded. Tarkentower, in my mind, is a lot like Dr. Frankenstein. He is sick of seeing his patients die in the hospital and wants to find a cure for everything, for life itself. He invents a fantastic machine and puts the whole world into a loop, forcing everyone to live the same day over and over. Then, periodically, some people are chosen to move forward to the next day, living on an earth that is almost empty. The buildings are still there, the cars, the shops, the money, and the farms. It seems like the perfect solution to population explosion.

But no utopia is ever really perfect. In fact, these places often end up becoming dystopian in nature. In this book, we see people continue to make the same mistakes they always have, even after they move out of the loop and into the future. Local governments are formed and the rule of law established, but then chaos breaks out, showing how ugly we can all be under any circumstance.

Added to that, the people who are repeating the same day, on a subconscious level they know it. And this repetition is slowly driving them insane, just like our lives sometimes feel. Haven't you ever felt the need to break out and do something different, but you couldn't? To mix it up a little? To challenge the rules? Haven't you felt that your life is always the same boring routine? Maybe Tarkentower's time loop is more real than you know.

As more and more deranged individuals arrive in the future, things go from pleasant to hellbent. Like the characters in the book, you have to ask yourself, is the solution provided by Dr. Tarkentower really any better?

Meet Lewis Fuller. He's sick of going to school everyday. When he wakes up in the future, he's confused. This the first day of the rest of his life and he's got a lot of catching up to do. Somehow, he's got to find a way to stop Tarkentower and turn his machine off. And to do that, he's going to need a lot of help.

Daniel Scott White

October 2018

