 
## Time Shifters

Episode One

by

Shanna Lauffey

First published in Great Britain in 2014

Smashwords Edition

**ISBN:** 9781310826696

Copyright Shanna Lauffey 2014

Shanna Lauffey has asserted the right to be identified as the author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All Rights Reserved

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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author's imagination and used fictitiously.

## Time Shifters

Episode One of The Chronicles of the Harekaiian

### Chapter One

My people live invisibly among you, though each of us disappear within the multitudes of humanity in our own ways. For some it is easy to fade into the crowd. We serve you in shops, or better yet, in restaurants where people come and go frequently and government surveillance of income is more difficult to track.

_Some of us prefer to live off-grid, although it is becoming more challenging to remain unnoticed in a world dominated by documentation and records. We have often been mistaken for Gypsies or hippies, partly because of the_ colorful _silks and velvets that we wear. These are always in blues and purples;_ colors _that make the eye turn away in distant focus._

_It is by these_ colors _that we first recognise others of our kind when we cross paths. Few of us know each other well. We drift. We make friends, then move on. Like many people who pass through the lives of others, we are easily forgotten._

Many choose to slide into the past, to times when individuals were more easily overlooked. Yet the excitement of the present sits more naturally, even for a Time Shifter.

We can shift through time or across distance, but never both at once. It would make us easier to track, though we never thought that a time would come when anyone would think to track us.

We were wrong.

At first we thought it was the government. The military in particular is always looking for special abilities to exploit. But as more of us were taken, we wondered... Did someone wish us harm? How did they know of us? Discovering answers to these questions quickly became essential to our survival. We had little time to find them as our numbers began to thin too quickly... far too quickly...

September 2015, a Moroccan restaurant in Los Angeles

Akalya reached for a handful of Bastilla, her favorite delicacy among the fragrant Moroccan dishes that covered the table. The powdered sugar that covered the pastry stuck to her hands as she savoured the contrast between its sweetness and the spicy chicken filling within the succulent pie. Her companions, Jon and Alice, talked between themselves, enjoying the exotic atmosphere as they sat cross-legged on cushions at the low table. Dim candlelight reflected moving images, like dancing fairies across the rich fabrics that covered the cushions and the brightly patterned walls that surrounded them.

Jon and Alice were _Memlekel_ , ordinary people. They wore jeans and casual shirts, yet reeked of office polyester with their plastered false smiles and short-cropped hairstyles. Jon wore his neatly trimmed in almost a military cut so that the sandy color was hardly detectable except on the top where a generous wave belied the effect, while Alice's soft brown curls fell just below her ears. They did not know about the _Harekaiian_ people, or that their waitress as well as the chef were of Akalya's kinship. Akalya had noted two others of her kind at a table by the opposite wall. Drifters probably, yet some instinct always drew them to places where others could be found.

Akalya did not know their names. She could not be sure if their paths had crossed before. The effect of the low lighting and the colors that they wore produced the desired result, even on their own kind. The eye focuses rich blues and purples at a distance. Reds and yellows would draw attention as they made the eye adjust so that things appeared nearer, allowing the cooler colors to dissolve into a haze of background. Even Alice's soft pink top and Jon's ivory shirt drew the eye away from the shorter wavelengths near the indigo end of the spectrum, as in Akalya's long, dark blue/purple skirt and shawl, and her deep purple satin Gypsy blouse.

It served both as disguise and as an identifier to their own kind. It had never occurred to any of Akalya's people that a day would come when some among the _Memlekel_ would recognize the mark of the _Harekai_.

A fracas just inside the kitchen began to draw attention. Akalya had witnessed the capture of illegal aliens in restaurants in Los Angeles before. It was a regular feature in certain establishments. The shouts and kitchen doors flying open sounded very much like such a capture. The ethnic table cleaners would put up a nominal fuss, then allow themselves to go along with the inevitable. Usually they were Mexican. The border crossers kept their full pay checks in their pockets for such eventualities and would often return in time for their next shift. Still, the scuffle brought a little diversion to the onlookers. Akalya saw two men dragging a captive into the main dining room, only the captive was the chef, a _Harekai_ , and the captors were not wearing uniforms.

She did not stop to think as the couple across the room were assaulted next by two more men that burst through the doors from the restaurant kitchen. Akalya did not even observe the protocol that usually kept her people safe; never shift where you might be observed. It was only a slight distance jump. A new customer had opened the door to the street and the shift to just outside at that moment would appear as if she had moved very quickly. Then she made another jump to just beyond view of the glass door and she was free to shift through time. By some fluke, the street was empty of onlookers... perhaps because it was a Sunday.

It was one of the oldest streets of Los Angeles and would not be so unpopulated often. Although she did not expect that any pursuer could follow her, Akalya shifted forward instead of back. Skipping a day would not bring any great consequence, except that her trail would grow cold in that time. Choosing a time in the darkest part of the morning just before dawn would make anyone who saw her suddenly appear believe that she had been there all along and had only just caught their eye. People easily believed whatever made most sense to them.

She walked then, thinking hard about what to do. Akalya had only a few friends among her own kind in the area. She must contact Gaye to warn her. After walking far enough to duck into an alley where a trash dumpster could hide her presence, she shifted forward a few hours more so that Gaye would be awake. Then she walked carefully out of the alleyway and lost herself amidst the crowd of busy people going to lunch from their respectable office jobs. She stepped onto a bus that was heading towards Manhattan Beach to put some distance behind where she had last been seen. If there were some way of tracking shifts, a little mundane travel would cool the trail.

Akalya got off the bus when it stopped in a familiar area just past El Segundo and entered a small diner that she knew had a back door. She watched the people around her carefully as she made her way to a public phone in a partially concealed hallway in the back.

To her relief, Gaye picked up the phone after just two rings.

"Hello?"

"Gaye, I saw three people taken away last night. Wait, it was the night before. Have you seen anything suspicious?"

"Akalya?"

"Yes. Let's be careful about names in case your phone is tapped. I'm on a public one. I sound paranoid, don't I?"

"Well yes, but if you actually saw..."

"Is your house still up for sale?"

"Yes." Gaye laughed a little as she admitted it. "I thought I would try selling it on Ebay, just for a laugh since no one was making an offer. Can you believe that some joker actually offered sixty-nine cents for it?"

Akalya began to relax a little for the first time since the interruption of her Moroccan meal. She even began to regret the loss of the rest of the Bastilla.

"Maybe I should make an offer for it. What would you say to..."

She had been about to say, "a fiver" as a joke, but the conversation was suddenly stopped by the sound of Gaye screaming and scuffling noises that suggested that she was being attacked.

This time Akalya was going to have to take a risk. She could not let all of her people disappear until she was the last one to be hunted down. There was no doubt in her mind that she would be as much a target as any of the others. She reached her consciousness through the telephone, grasping the familiarity of her friendship with Gaye and mentally followed her to wherever they might choose to take her. Once the attunement was established, she hung up the telephone. Whether they, whoever _they_ were, would have the ability to sense or follow an attunement was impossible to know, but she had to try. She could not sentence herself to a life of running and fear any more than she could abandon Gaye to whatever fate awaited her at the hands of her captors.

Distance jumps felt different than time shifts. Akalya was sure that was part of the reason why only one could be accomplished at a time. It was an odd feeling, as if she were standing in the place of origin and then like a double exposed photograph, was also at the destination. This time, the destination was unknown so she could only initiate the shift, then wait and see. Akalya didn't know what a _Memlekel_ would see if one of them were to walk into the back hallway of the diner and observe her standing by the phone in mid-shift. She tried to look as if she were patiently waiting for someone to call back, hoping that she at least appeared corporeal, or not at all.

Her sense of time was nonexistent in the process of a distance shift, but she knew that the driving time to the beach was no more than half an hour from Gaye's house. Akalya's sense of direction told her that her friend was definitely moving west. The ocean would halt their progress eventually. Her visual impression of Gaye's position was dark during the transport, but Akalya saw in her dim vision of Gaye's perceptions that a hood was removed from her just before she was taken into a portacabin situated on the upper beach near The Strand. Akalya saw it all as if in the incorporeal images of a dream, yet she recognized the area and especially the Redondo Beach Harbor in the background.

_Perhaps the kidnappers are amateurs_ , Akalya thought. They might not have been aware of her ability to attune to another of her kind, but a professional kidnapper would take the victim inside before removing the hood to keep them ignorant of their location, unless they were concerned about onlookers in a public place... or if they were setting a trap.

There was no time to consider the latter. Akalya shifted as she saw the captors leave the room where the captives had been shoved inside. She placed herself in an alcove behind the wall where the door opened. If they re-entered suddenly, she would have a moment to shift before they turned and saw her. There were eight _Harekaiian_ standing before her. Four from the restaurant, Gaye and three others that Akalya did not know. They recognized her as _Harekai_ immediately and said nothing, looking at her with haunted eyes. _Why don't they simply shift out?_ Akalya wondered.

"We can't shift," Gaye said quietly. "They've done something, I don't know what."

Akalya reached forward and took the hands of the _Harekai_ closest to her. The others quickly joined hands as well so that they made a circle. All of them closed their eyes and tried to sink into the shifting consciousness.

Akalya, automatically attuned to everyone in the circle by the physical contact, then recognized that a barrier was preventing them from completing the shift. An intangible interference felt as if it were blocking the mind-shift that preceded the physical movement. She took the lead, attempting to shift herself and pull them with her. First she tried a distance jump, visualizing The Strand just above their location. With her eyes closed, she brought the image of a particular spot next to a lamp post to her mind and tried to feel herself there. The pull to shift was present, but her charges pulled her back like eight sets of efficient emergency brakes. Despite their willingness to follow, another force prevented them from reaching the level of vibration required. She tried again, but the result was the same. The attempt had a _moment of anticipation_ quality like a broken starter motor on a car that whines just on the edge of turning over, yet never quite sparks. Her charges were dead weight, too anchored to take with her.

The door opened. People rushed in, perhaps three of them. Akalya had stepped back into her place of concealment and could not see around the door to be sure whether there were more, but those she could see immediately turned and saw her. They had clearly known of her presence. There was no choice. She would have to escape quickly and come back for the others another time. Hoping against her own doubts that the dampener effect was not a feature of the room rather than something inflicted on the individuals within, she let go of her charges both physically and mentally and shifted out. One of the _Memlekel_ tried to physically grab her, but she faded to elsewhere as his hands reached around her. Even in the twilight world of mid-shift, Akalya felt relief that the shift had worked, albeit a little more slowly than usual.

There had not been time to assess very much about her would-be captors. Though they wore no insignia, they had been dressed identically in black cargo trousers and T-shirts, so perhaps it was meant to be a uniform of sorts after all. The one who had reached for her had dark hair like her own, but wore dark sunglasses so that she had been unable to see his eyes. He had been a little taller than her and she had sensed... something. She wasn't sure what. She only knew that she was glad that she had shifted before he had been able to touch her.

### Chapter Two

To run in fear holds no glamor, yet I did not travel far. To free those of my kind who remained captive seemed somehow required. I did not know why, nor did I stop to think. There was no time...

With no knowledge of what technology had been used to trap my brethren, I had no way of guessing how closely the captors might track my shifts. I was never good at distance anyway. I shifted back forty years, taking my chances that the location would not bring a sudden reminder of solid rock that would later be removed for development. The memory would have been brief as I died within the crystalline structure. To my relief, the gamble was won. I stood on a beach for a flicker of a second, noting the close proximity of cliffs made from natural erosion.

I shifted the distance up to The Strand. It was here that I felt most at home, remembering a time when I knew this place well. I made several time shifts then, forward and backwards to confuse the trail. Whether it would make a difference I could not know, but it seemed to me that it must. Then, I placed myself on the beach a little distance away behind a lifeguard shack where I would not be visible from my last point of departure and walked a little way, hiding under the pier.

That was when I shifted forward again, this time knowing absolutely that my hiding place would still exist at my time destination. The time I chose was only a few minutes before the present as I knew it. I watched my pursuers as they entered what I could now see was a construction portacabin on the beach, a moment away from discovering my presence within.

I could only hope that they wouldn't think of the ruse I had used to double back to a moment before my departure as I attempted to formulate a plan.

Akalya tried to think hard about the resistance she had felt as she had attempted to bring the others out of the portacabin. There had to be some clue as to how the shifters were being contained. She speculated on the fact that she had been able to shift out normally, so it couldn't have been anything that affected the portacabin itself, like sound waves or a dampener of some sort, unless something had been done to the captives first to make them susceptible.

Thoughts went through her mind that strained her knowledge of electrical and mechanical Physics as well as radio and microwaves. She thought of the crystals in cell phone technology, but people who might have had phones in their pockets had been close enough to her in the portacabin that she would have been affected equally.

She needed to question the captives. It would not be easy with their captors aware that a rogue was shifting freely outside of their contained prison. They would surely watch for her and lay traps. The question was, what kind of traps had they already used to capture several of the Harekaiian?

The captors approached the cabin door. Akalya could see them better now from the outside. She counted five, recognizing the four who had made the captures at the Moroccan restaurant and the dark haired one that had nearly grabbed her in the portacabin, a minute or so from now. For the moment, they didn't appear to suspect that they were being observed. The dark-haired one appeared to be in charge, issuing orders to the others that Akalya could not hear. There was nothing remarkable about any of the lead captor's companions. The four of them had varying shades of medium brown hair, ranging in length from just above the ears to just below, while the dark-haired one wore his longer, just above shoulder length. Not military then. All of the captors appeared to be lean and fit, as if they participated in some form of physical training. There was something in the way that they moved, as if they possessed far more strength than ordinary movement required.

There was no point in waiting for the minute it would take for them to discover her presence. She would only see herself appear up on the Strand and then disappear again as they ran outside in pursuit. Fascination for watching her own apparations had thinned many years ago. Akalya shifted back, just half a day so that she could observe the portacabin in the darkness of night, just twenty-four hours before the raid on the Moroccan restaurant would occur.

This, at least, they would have no way of anticipating. Whatever their movements or plans, Akalya was reasonably certain that they could not yet know that a rogue would escape their raid on the following evening. She approached carefully, reaching out her senses towards the unseen room. Her brief exposure to the captives had given her some sense of their presence, though it was significantly less certain than an actual tag. There were fewer presences within, but all of them exuded familiarity.

With a vision of the inside of the room in her mind, Akalya performed a distance shift, placing herself again in the alcove behind the door. Three pair of eyes turned towards her as she apparated. She recognized three of the captives from the night to follow.

"I was here briefly tomorrow," she explained. "Why is it that you cannot shift out?"

A woman wearing a dark green pullover under a midnight blue poncho that partially covered a long, deep purple skirt collected the presence of mind to answer her first.

"The one with the dark hair like our kind... he can tag. Only instead of following, he can prevent us from shifting."

Akalya cocked her head, a confused expression playing on her smooth features.

"Is he Harekaiian?"

The other two captives, nondescript men wearing nondescript gray and blue clothing, looked at the female captive, then to Akalya. They were clearly of her people as well, but they had no answers. The woman only shook her head in bewilderment, but one of the men tried to impart what few facts he had to share.

"I have never heard of such a skill; to prevent the others from entering the warp. If he is of us, he is mutant... or perhaps a different strain. He is not like us. Whatever you do, don't allow him to touch you."

Akalya nodded, then tried the door. It was locked securely. Simply walking out of the room was not an option. Even if it were, that would not change the fact that the captives had become unable to shift.

"Has he said what he wants with our people? Have you asked him?"

The woman shook her head.

"He will not speak with us. The others command silence, but we have tried to ask questions and the dark one always walks out of the room, never acknowledging that he heard."

Akalya thought carefully. A plan began to form in her mind. It would be risky, but the only way to untangle the dilemma was to obtain more information. The dark-haired man would have to be made to talk, and his avoidance of his captives when they tried to speak to him suggested that there was a weakness that might be exploited.

The sound of a key entering the lock spurred Akalya into quick action.

"I need time to think  I'll be back." She shifted to the lamp post on The Strand before anyone could enter to see her, then she shifted again, to a time that they could not follow. This time it was a fifty year shift, to a time when Akalya had been growing up on this very beach. She had chosen mid-day, on a Tuesday. This Tuesday was special to her, as it had been the day after Jack had moved out of the balconied house on Shell Street in El Porto.

El Porto Beach was at the northern most end of The Strand. It would eventually be swallowed up by Manhattan Beach just south of it, so that the beach communities lining The Strand would consist of just three small cities; Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo Beaches. El Porto was nothing more than a small patch of small roads west of Highland Avenue and too close to an oil refinery. The crude oil from the tanker ships washed up on the beach regularly as greasy white foam, accepted by the locals as an inevitability in an age before concern about pollution of the oceans had become part of the collective consciousness of the beach communities. Children were still allowed to swim freely within the oil and salt of the crashing waves.

The lamp posts on The Strand were an older style. They made for a good anchor point in a place that had changed little in more than four decades. Some of the houses had changed and the world beyond the pedestrian walkway was subject to the ravages of property developers, but The Strand itself remained very much as it had been when Akalya had ridden her first bicycle across the slabs of concrete on the only flat surface near the beach.

In time a bicycle path would be added to the sandy beach just beneath The Strand, but the pedestrian causeway would continue to be maintained much as it was now. With the time shift, more subtle things changed. Some of the beachfront houses had been rebuilt in Akalya's natural time from the older versions that she could now see. The plants that grew on the rise from the beach to The Strand were different. Akalya remembered the blue and pink flowers of the succulents that she had climbed up through more than once as an active nine-year-old.

On the other side of the beachfront houses was a small road, and beyond that, houses and apartments were situated on a steep hill that had provided for many thoroughly unsafe rides down and across the small road, sitting on a skateboard. Akalya remembered her young life on Shell Street, and the balconied house where a man named Jack used to sit out in the evenings and play guitar. Akalya had missed Jack's easy presence and his music when he moved out. No one had ever seen the new tenants move in. No one ever saw them come or go. Now she understood why.

Akalya reached into one of the deep pockets of her purple velvet skirt and pulled out a flat leather wallet. She smiled, remembering the many times she had shifted back to this time so that she could sit on the roof of one of the beach houses and once again enjoy the peaceful atmosphere of her childhood home. She had no guess as to how many times she had shifted here to listen to Jack sing from the balcony while the gulls cried and the soft crash of the ocean waves mixed with the scent of salt and oil that she associated with this time and place. The visits had been frequent enough that over several visits, she had taken the trouble to establish a local bank account so that she could have access to money with the right dates printed on it, in case she wanted to enjoy a soft ice cream or a hot dog from the vendor on the beach. She had even allowed the money to collect so that she might stay for an extended time if she should choose to do so. That time had come, though not for the relaxing vacation that she had envisioned. She flipped open the wallet and found the appropriately dated driving license that she had obtained in order to open the account. It was time to rent a property and set up a safe house, far away from those who were capturing her people in her own time.

If she was any judge of age, the four _Memlekel_ were not yet born. Though she would have been guessed by most bystanders as no more than thirty-five years of age, Akalya was actually nearly sixty. The Harekaiian did not age as quickly as ordinary men and women. Perhaps, she speculated, that might prove to be a motive for the captures. Men had chased after the quest for eternal youth for centuries, though slower aging was a far cry from not aging at all.

That was when a plan formulated in her mind. Somehow the captors had learned the identities of several of Akalya's people. If she could learn the captor's identities in return, she could trace their backgrounds and perhaps learn how and when they had been recruited to track her kind. There would be risks involved, not least of all because the dark-haired man might well share some or all of her abilities, but she did have the advantage of time shifting at her disposal. She guessed that the reason the man had refused to speak with his captives was that he wanted to avoid being tagged, though his touch was somehow responsible for their inability to shift.

A mutation perhaps? Harlan, one of her kind who had studied Physics, might have been able to concoct a theory. Akalya made a mental note to pay a visit to him in her travels. But first she had an apartment to rent, and for that she would need money. She walked up to Highland Avenue where she knew she would find a branch of the Bank of America. ATM machines would not come into popular use until 1972, and Akalya's safe house was situated in 1965.

### Chapter Three

I tore a page from my past and stepped back into a haven where I felt safe, or at least as close to secure as any place can be for a nomadic people that slip through time and space.

_It was reasonable to assume that they, whoever_ they _were, would move the captives now that they knew that someone knew where they were. I had managed to tag Gaye with a trace that would hold for some time, but this presented new dilemmas._

Traces were seldom used and the physics behind them is little understood, even by us. I had only to gently touch her shoulder and the connection had been made, expanding on the tag I had placed on her through the telephone when it had all started. If I wished to find her through a change in space or time, I now needed only to visualize her as I sank into the mental process of performing a shift.

The danger was that no one knew what would happen if one of us tried to follow someone who had shifted to another place as well as another time since the tag had been set. The limitation of doing one or the other was unlikely to change. It was one of the reasons it was little used. Some speculated that whichever path provided least resistance would result from the follow-shift. Others feared that the attempt at doing both time and space at once would trap the follower in some form of limbo, drifting between spaces and moments in an immeasurable eternity.

The other danger was that there was no way to predict what sort of circumstances the other person might be found in. In this case, I could easily be walking into a trap and find myself unable to shift out of whatever enclosure or field was keeping the others captive.

Akalya had seen the inside of the house only once as a child. Her parents had socialized with other tenants on Shell Street, as all of them were waitresses or bartenders. The easy, relaxed way of life in a beach community appealed to many types of nomad.

They all had their own stories. Some had fallen into casual work arrangements and simply didn't make the effort to do anything else. Jobs were always available for serving staff. Any place they chose to go would be likely to provide quick employment, as well as the convention of tipping which the government had not yet worked out how to tax in 1965.

Akalya entered her new premises with a key provided by a rental company she had found on Highland Avenue. Perhaps it had been fate that took her steps past the real estate agent on her way to the bank, but she had recognized the photograph of the balconied house in the office window right away. She had withdrawn enough money to cover the rent and the security deposit that was stated on the ad in the window and had gone straight in and rented the house on the spot. She didn't care that it hadn't yet been cleaned.

The rent had seemed cheap at first, until she remembered that only the houses right on The Strand had been pricey back in those days and that the economy had been very different then. Leases had not come into common use either, so she was free to rent on a month by month basis. She speculated on whether to seek employment locally or to keep up the rent payments in other ways. When it came to obtaining money among her people, 'other ways' could take many forms.

Restaurant staff would often come and go with a frequency that allowed the _Harekaiian_ to disappear within an ever changing panorama of the lower spectrum of the working classes where faces were seldom remembered, if even recognized as human at all. It was an old stand-by and she nearly applied for a position as a bar waitress at the Sea View Inn, which was an atmospheric little bar on Highland Avenue not far from the top of Shell Street. Then she decided that she didn't have time to attend a job when she had much to do elsewhere, and elsewhen. Selling old coins that she could slip back and acquire would be enough to maintain the rent for a few months.

The massive living room had beautiful, dark hardwood floors. A pillar in the middle of the room helped to keep the roof up over such an expanse. Akalya speculated that houses had long since ceased to be designed with so much space in her own time. She walked through the property, noting an average sized bedroom, a small bathroom with no tub, but an enclosed shower, and a good sized kitchen. Apart from the size of the living room, the layout was much like the house she had lived in as a child further up the street.

The other primary difference was that where her house near the top of the hill had front and back patios, Jack's house was built on multiple levels. The steep incline of the street might have posed some interesting challenges to architects who presumably designed the beach houses. Jack's house had a lower level garage as well as stairs to the roof where the fireworks over Redondo Beach Pier could be easily seen on the 4th of July. Akalya had fond memories of the one occasion she had joined the adults for the yearly roof party. Usually she climbed as far out on the rock pier as possible with the other children to get a closer look at the bright sparks of light. It was a wonder that none of them had fallen and been injured, perhaps even killed in the darkness over the lapping waves that crashed against the rocks. The only danger that had ever concerned them was the possibility of getting pinched by the crabs that made their homes among the rocks of the promontory.

With the advantage of time on her side, Akalya decided to enjoy the house that she had always envied. She walked out onto the balcony, running her fingers carefully over the faded greenish-blue paint on the wooden hand rails. She wished that she could play guitar, like Jack, though she would have been too shy to perform for the whole street as he had done. She wondered where he had moved to and whether he still lived in her time, though he would be about seventy-five if he had lived that long. She wondered what the rest of his young life had been like and whether he had retained that free spirit that she had admired when she watched him sing. It occurred to her then that at the impressionable age of nine, her ideal of the perfect man had been formed by a guitar player who wore his dark hair below his ears and sported a closely trimmed beard. Sitting and playing his music on the balcony most evenings wearing cut-off jeans and sandals, but no shirt, he had represented the sort of freedom that would later come naturally to Akalya as she learned the nature of her people and why they lived as they did.

Akalya turned, observing the textured stucco walls that she associated with the quaint houses of El Porto. In her own time the walls had become smoother, which she felt lessened their character. This was a house for an artist, so like her friend Vivian's house just two doors up the road. Some of the houses of Shell Street had been made for a time when musicians and painters could gather in such small communities and find the sort of space that embraced their nature. Akalya thought of her childhood friends; Vivian who lived across the road from her old house and Jeannie who lived two streets away. They were _Memlekel_ , but they had been her closest companions when she had first been discovering her 'different' nature.

The hints had been present for some time, but it was only when she had come close to being killed that she suddenly realized that she was different. She had thought as she sat on a skateboard at the top of the hill that she would need to put her feet down and stop this time, rather than hurtling across the road to run into her friend Jerry's garage door. She instinctively put her feet down to stop the skateboard just as a car that would have killed her zipped past on the road at the bottom. It occurred to her then that her friends would not have known to stop themselves. She had been unshaken by the incident and simply carried the skateboard back to the top, knowing that no car would be there when Vivien reached the bottom for her turn, which was next. Akalya had carried on playing with her friends, but a window of her mind had opened and she knew from then on that she knew things that others did not, and would grow into abilities that she did not yet understand.

Had she told her mother of her newfound awareness on that day, perhaps she would have been taught her skills sooner. Instead she had been left to discover them on her own, while the adults in her family attempted to lose themselves in the mundane world of waitresses and bartenders and far too much drink.

Akalya stepped back inside the empty house, letting her ruminations fade back into the faded realms of memory. The trouble was, she remembered far too well. In the meantime, she needed some form of furniture for the house, though it was likely to be sparse. Collecting things had never featured in her nomadic existence. A functional chair and perhaps a small table would do, along with something to sleep on. She was, after all, only a short term visitor to this time and place.

Akalya sat on the floor and shifted forward in time to the early morning hours of the following day. She knew where to look for furnishings that would be left unattended long enough for her to grab hold of them and shift back to the spacious living room, now that she had a visual impression of it. Some might call it stealing, but the items would never be missed when she returned them back to their origin when her business here was finished. She would have to be careful not to spill anything on the items she borrowed.

### Chapter Four

It is difficult to believe in anything spiritual when you have too much science, yet I have seen things that defy explanation by what is known. One of our people, Harlan Edmundson by name, achieved a university degree in Physics, using his ability to attend concurrent classes in his quest to understand why we are what we are. His conclusion came from Biology instead; that we are the next stage of human evolution. Effectively a mutation in thought wave control that will spread as the random manifestations breed further into the greater population and advance humanity to a higher level.

Personally I think he watches too much science fiction on television. As much as his theory seems to make sense, such a leap strikes me as unlikely in a world where a very large portion of the population still wallows in intentional ignorance and seeks ways to bring pain to their fellow man to assuage the pangs of their own self perceived inadequacy.

Somewhere in this imperfect world, the dark-haired man who had the power to interfere with shifters had probably been born by 1965. Like my own childhood self, he would be growing up in a world not yet ready for such abilities to manifest. He was the key to unlock this mystery. My task now would be to follow him through time, to seek out answers.

With a base of operation established, I set out to find the answer to the most important question; Why.

Akalya cast her eyes over the new items around the living room, memorizing every detail. She had kept her acquisitions simple; a large upholstered chair covered with a brick-red colored cotton fabric dominated the room. Next to the chair was a small mahogany end table that would serve most purposes. Eating would have to be done from her lap, but it wouldn't be the first time that she had lived in such casual conditions.

She walked over to the chair and ran her fingers over the soft fabric, so unlike the artificial nylon or polyester based fabric on most furniture in her natural time. She thought to herself that the world had lost something when it had moved away from natural fabrics. The rest of the room remained empty, apart from a blue ceramic vase that stood on the mantel-like shelf that ran along the wall next to the door to the balcony. It had been her one indulgence. She had seen it in the used furniture shop where she had found the table and admired the delicate shaped ceramic flowers that decorated its curved side in shades of pink and green. Other than these items, all she had acquired was a simple mattress to throw on the floor in the small bedroom. She would need some basic household items, but she knew the dangers of shifting continually until she reached exhaustion and decided that the few furnishings would suffice for the moment.

She had saved as much energy as she could for the shifting to come. With her impressions of the room established, she shifted back down to The Strand, placing herself near one of the old lamp posts so that anyone passing would assume she had been concealed behind it. She took a moment to observe the early morning beach life. An occasional walker could be seen on The Strand. A pair of old people with metal detectors searched the beach near the waterline for lost coins. Behind them, Akalya could see the surfers sitting casually on their boards as the swell of small waves passed under them while they waited for that legendary seventh wave that would be big enough to give them a good ride. El Porto wasn't a big wave beach, but it provided sufficient sport for the young men who lived locally. The sport had not yet spread to many young women.

Akalya walked along The Strand. Walking all the way to Redondo would be too far after her busy morning and would tire her, but she needed time to think of where to place herself for best advantage for her task. She needed to anticipate where the kidnappers would likely pass and to find a vantage point well away from the spot where she would manifest during their encounter with her on the day of Gaye's capture. She had always found walking very meditative and conducive to thinking.

The early morning salty sea air relaxed her, as it had always done. The gentle crash of the waves and the cries of seagulls as they floated on the soft breeze drew her into her thoughts in an agreeable manner. She smiled a little as the familiar sights, sounds and smells assaulted her consciousness. Even the slight tar scent of El Porto sand as the rising sun released its fragrance brought pleasant associations of a part of her childhood that retained the best memories from an ever-changing life.

When she had walked as far as the Manhattan Beach pier, the small parking lot next to the street entrance to the pier reminded her that the kidnappers would have to park the van in which they transported their captives somewhere near the construction shed. With just a little trepidation, she shifted her mind forward a few years so that she wouldn't leave a trail directly to her base of operation, then distance shifted to the spot on The Strand where she would have a clear sight of the shed in her own time. A slight shudder passed through her as she observed the scene that had become associated with the kidnappings.

Once again, Akalya had chosen a time early in the morning so that there would be few people about. She considered whether to walk over the area and try to determine where they would have to park, then she noted that Redondo Beach had changed most out of all the beach communities and decided that she would have to shift forward again, closer to the time.

She chose the late evening on the night before the abductions. The change was jolting on an emotional level. The area had changed drastically. Even the rock pier had been altered in its course and no longer had the narrow cement path that had allowed herself and her friends to walk out further than was probably safe. Her interest, however, was in the placements of parking lots and nearby buildings. The parking lot, at least, was obvious. The one for the pier was practically on the beach itself. There weren't even any steps between the hard surface and the soft sand. They would almost certainly bring the captives there.

Right at the end of The Strand, some of the old beach houses had been converted into apartments, or completely replaced by newer buildings, in a relative sense. The one she chose had probably been built in the 1970's. Several of them still had the flat roofs that served as observation decks in seaside houses. The rooftop she chose was third from the end from the parking lot. It had a low wall where she could conceal herself adequately. The building itself was a brick red two-level affair with a sand-colored balcony front that made the building look as though it had been cobbled together from two separate previous structures. The architecture was asymmetrical in places, with the balconies jutting out in a sharp triangular design. It seemed to Akalya more artistic than practical, but it was ideally placed for her purposes. Sound carried near the beach. The low wall would provide cover, and choosing a rooftop further from the parking lot than the end building was prudent, in case her quarry should think to look up.

Akalya was beginning to feel very alone. She had not spoken to another living soul since her brief exchange with the captives, apart from the rental agent in 1965. She was beginning to feel the strain of the situation and of having the responsibility thrust onto her with no one else among her own kind with whom she might consult. She began to wonder if she should have slept by now. One of the ever present dangers of consecutive shifting was that it was easy to lose track of your individual biological time. She tried to calculate when she had slept last. Somewhere in the midst of mentally tracking her movements since her meal at the Moroccan restaurant on the following evening to come, she drifted into an uneasy sleep.

### Chapter Five

To understand the reasons why we must choose between moving through time or space on any given shift is simple... if you happen to have a degree in Physics. For most of us, the understanding must come through practice and can be difficult to put into words to teach the young.

Basically, the same mechanism is used to move through time or space. Just like currency, you can only spend it once. Unlike in science fiction stories, we cannot move beyond a limited string of time. One of the Harekaiian cannot travel in the past beyond the point of his own birth; he cannot travel in the future beyond the time allotted for him to die, though our lives are long. We are also tied to our own time and will revert to it eventually, sometimes inconveniently when we sleep if we are overly tired. Shifts are inevitably a temporary condition. We perform them as a tourist along the warp of our time of existence and must return to the point of origin.

Moving through distance is also limited to what we can see or visualize clearly. Though the process is much as modern scientists understand wormhole Physics, the knack for warping a millisecond of time so that we occupy a space at two different points simultaneously is essentially the same as warping through our timeline.

Time and space are intertwined, else a time shift of more than a day or two would result in the Shifter appearing at a point in space where the place he had been standing on planet Earth before the shift would leave him floating in the vacuum of outer space. There is no question that shifts of less than two days either direction are easiest. Even for such a short span, the traveler's point in space must be accommodated in the warp of the time string, else we would come out in a different location as the Earth turns and follows its orbit around the Sun, perhaps even inside solid rock. Thus we can do one or the other, but not both at once. A shift in time requires that we anchor to a gravitational point, thus in effect we have already moved through time and space at once and cannot further choose to move our gravitational location when we enter the warp.

How shall I explain the warp...

To enter warping is a mental process in which thoughts are sped up to a wordless velocity and the electrical field of the body begins to vibrate, oscillating between two different intertwining wavelengths that quickly cause the warping of the time continuum so that the Shifter can move freely between one point and another. To the observer it appears to be an instantaneous process, but to the Shifter it feels more like the slow motion that one experiences when in the process of experiencing an accident involving falling or crashing into something. The result, however, is a simple movement through the time stream, no more violent than taking a step.

Akalya awoke to the sound of a seagull's cry as it quickly grew very much louder. The sound drew nearer and the bird landed with the abrasive rasp of its webbed feet shuffling in the loose sand right in front of Akalya's face. She jerked into full consciousness, instinctively waving the seagull away with her hand. She shivered in the chill morning air, then wondered if the thought of the large sea bird having her eyes in mind for its breakfast might have caused part of her reaction.

Despite her velvet wraps, she felt exposed. Not only was she cold, but she sensed that she had reverted to her own time, which always presented a danger when sleeping. She was hungry... ravenously so. Shifting burned a lot of energy and she had been doing too much of it quickly in succession. However, if she wanted breakfast, she knew that she would have to do it at least once more.

She stood and looked out over her surroundings. Few businesses would be open in the early morning hours, although so near to the beach an early cafe wouldn't be out of the question. Unfortunately, all she could see in the immediate area were a few marina buildings and rows of private houses, apart from a liquor store on the corner behind her chosen parapet. The doors stood open. Some manner of food could presumably be found within.

She sorted through her pockets and separated some money from her own time from the outdated cash, then shifted down to a spot just out of sight of the glass windows of the store. Then she walked in and started picking up anything she could find that would provide protein, including a large bottle of milk. She indulged her whims with a package of cakes as well. She knew that the sugar would have a grounding effect, as long as she didn't overindulge. As soon as she had paid for her provisions, she walked back to the spot just out of range of the window and shifted back to the rooftop, then shifted back just a little more than a full day so that she was back to her lookout post. She didn't know when she had faded from the rooftop during the night, but her previous manifestation was certainly gone in the moment just before dawn as she settled down to enjoy her feast.

She had expected to have to spend several hours waiting and watching for any activity in the parking lot below, and was just speculating on the chances of any of the inhabitants of the apartments below wandering up to the roof patio when the sound of car tires on tarmac broke the misty, quiet morning beach sounds. The abrasive crunch of rubber on the sand strewn hard surface sounded invasive as it broke the gentle rumble of morning surf and distant cries of sea birds. Even the change in sound as the engine stopped irritated senses that instinctively responded to the insidious usurpation of the natural song of the beachside dawn.

A car door slammed and Akalya decided it was time to look over the low wall and determine whether the intruder had any connection to her mission. At first she could not see him past the other apartment buildings that stood between her place of concealment and the parking lot. The back fin of an old American make of car was just visible, but the driver was out of her line of sight. Then she saw the familiar dark hair as the driver walked into view, moving towards The Strand. Akalya all but threw herself backwards to hide behind her small barrier. Her breath suddenly came in short gasps and she felt her heart thumping. Then as she gained control of her initial impulse, she wondered why she was so afraid.

Her logical, conscious mind took over then, assuring her that there was no ethereal connection between them and that although there was good reason for caution, she needn't panic. After a few moments of listening intently for footsteps, she became bold enough to risk peering over the edge of the wall again. She saw him immediately, sitting on the low wall where The Strand met the beach and gazing out to sea. She had a clear view of him now, although he was facing away from her, and could examine him while remaining unseen. His mannerisms told her that he had no idea that he was being watched, though she made an effort to keep her vibrational levels low so that he would not detect her presence. Without any way of knowing his abilities or relationship to her people, caution seemed prudent.

A few minutes passed, then another engine could be heard from the direction of the parking lot. The dark haired man turned his head immediately as soon as the roar of a larger engine became apparent. Akalya guessed that it was the transport van. The man swung his legs over the wall and walked briskly towards the sound. She began to wonder why a meeting was apparently occurring in the early morning hours. It would be nightfall before the raid on the Moroccan restaurant occurred, and there had not been so many captives to account for an all day operation. Akalya wanted a closer look, though she was nervous about shifting with the kidnappers so close in proximity.

She was just thinking of chancing a simple distance shift to the next roof when they appeared, walking towards the portacabin on the beach. There were three of them. The dark haired man and two of the others whom Akalya recognized from her close encounter inside the portacabin. She watched them enter the enclosure, then took the chance of shifting to the end building where she could see the parking lot clearly. She saw the van parked a row of spaces away from the car the dark haired man had arrived in. Whether the other two kidnappers might still be inside it worried her.

She might have done a series of shifts to follow the dark haired man's progress and find where he lived, but that would be a long and exhausting task. Instead she shifted to the inside of his car, immediately ducking low in case anyone should appear and see her. She began carefully examining anything she could find to give her clues to his identity. The inside of the car gave the impression of long wear, with faded ivory imitation leather showing scuffs and other signs of age. She noted the Chevy symbol on the dashboard and guessed the car as something from the 1950's. The possibility that it might well be a valuable antique crossed her mind, but cars had never interested her. What she wanted was likely to be found in the glove compartment.

She opened it carefully, flitting her eyes up constantly to watch for activity and felt grateful that it hadn't been locked. The car registration was almost too easily found in a neat packet of papers that included insurance documents. The lack of the usual superfluous items in the glove compartment suggested someone who was very meticulous and tidy by nature. Akalya made a mental note of the personality trait. This man was unlikely to make sloppy mistakes. The name and address on the registration matched those on the insurance documents. Akalya had nothing with which to write down the information and dared not take anything away with her, so she recited the information over and over in her mind until she was sure that she would remember it, and began to mentally refer to her quarry as Marcus.

Marcus Cristea had an address in Santa Monica. Whether he actually lived there or only kept a location for using as an official address was yet to be seen, but it provided a starting point for Akalya's investigation. After deciding that she would find no additional information in the all too neatly kept car, Akalya replaced the documents just as she had found them and shifted back to her position outside of the liquor store. She had noted a bus stop on the street nearby. Fortunately she did not have to wait for long before a bus came along. She hadn't known the routes, but the bus was heading north and that was a good start. A few questions to the friendly driver enlightened her that she could get to Santa Monica Beach with just one change at the Los Angeles airport. She might have shifted the distance, but her mental images of the area weren't very clear and a cold trail over mundane transportation seemed wise. Besides, she needed time to think. The journey took less than two hours which might have given Marcus time to return home by the time she walked ten streets from the beach to his apartment, but she had the advantage. She need only shift back two and a half hours once she had found his address. She knew where he would be then.

At least Akalya knew where she had seen him appear at the beach. A hint of doubt crept into her mind as she wondered whether Marcus Cristea was himself a shifter, and might share her ability to be in two places at once.

### Chapter Six

Science fiction stories abound with theories about the consequences of occupying the same point in time multiple times and of making changes in the past that would affect the future. If my actions somehow prevented my grandfather from meeting my grandmother, would I still exist?

The answer is yes, I would continue to exist as I am because I had already been born in the future that led me back to the past. People try to understand such concepts by making up theories about multiple time lines, but in fact time does not exist as a linear sequence of cause and effect. Rather it could be more accurately modeled as a series of spirals that encompass many concurrent events. The effects of any given cause might show themselves in a past or future perception, and even before a point in linear time that the action that created the eventual result occurred. If my grandfather died in 1920, my mother's birth would already have occurred in 1929. Nothing can change it.

It's a difficult concept for most people to assimilate, but for Time Shifters it's essential. We cannot afford to limit our thinking to linear concepts of cause and effect, not if we want to come out of the other side intact.

That doesn't mean that we fully understand the physics behind our abilities. I had been caught completely off guard by the recent abductions. Questions of reasons conflicted with a struggle to work out how. Theoretically, we should be effectively invincible. On top of these other questions was the problem of how anyone knew about us. They had to know a lot to work out a way to stop our shifting ability.

Akalya approached the upstairs apartment cautiously. She preferred not to be seen by bystanders, but the early hour helped reduce the possibility that a neighbor would happen by. Having shifted back to the moment when she had first heard Marcus' car arrive at the Redondo Beach parking lot, she knew that most people would just be getting up for school or jobs, unless they worked somewhere like a bakery that required extra early hours.

The fence in front of the apartment building bothered her. She knew that it was nonsensical as she could shift out just as easily as if there were no barricade, but it invoked a feeling of claustrophobia and made her feel caged. _Nerves_ , she thought to herself. The slight possibility that Marcus could be looping through time at this very minute niggled at her, although logically she could not think of a reason that he would have known that she had come at this particular time to spy on him. Part of her trepidation also came from knowing that she would have to pick the lock to his door, as spatial shifting required at least a visualization of the destination, if not clear sight of it. If a neighbor observed her in the process, they might well call the police.

Picking the lock itself turned out to be an easy matter. The older apartments in the area were generally fitted with simple pin tumbler locks in the door handle, which could be easily picked with something as basic as an unfolded paper clip. Akalya was grateful that the occupant hadn't made the extra effort to install a second bolt lock, as people had begun to do more and more frequently. Still, the half-diamond lock pick she produced from one of her skirt pockets would have done the job. It just would have taken more time and made more noise to breach a bolt, when the tumbler lock could be opened with the device almost as easily as with the correct key.

Akalya slipped inside and closed the door quietly. She was reasonably sure that she had not been observed, though the slight chance of a neighbor looking through a small opening in their curtains was always a danger in residential areas. Her skill with the lock pick was such that she would have appeared to be only opening the door with a key, but she had no choice but to rely on the anonymity of neighbors for the rest. She turned and locked the door behind her, then noticed a chain latch just above her eye level. She considered latching that as well, as breaking through it would take a few seconds longer if someone came home. She then discarded the thought as it would have been a sure giveaway that someone was inside, or had at least been there if she shifted out beforehand.

Akalya turned again and examined the apartment. It reeked of ordinariness with its off-white walls and green shag carpets. The furniture in the living room was basic and cheap; a worn brown fabric covered sofa, a coffee table, one end table and a small bookcase with three shelves. There wasn't even a television. A kitchen was clearly visible through an opening to the left of the front door and Akalya peered in briefly to determine that no one stood just out of sight within. Then Akalya crept quietly to a small hallway beyond the living room and found that it led to two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The doors to all stood open, to her relief. Having to check for occupants through closed bedroom doors would have been a strain on her nerves. As it was, she was able to quickly check the rooms for occupants, then to begin a more thorough examination of the property.

The beds in both bedrooms were neatly made up. She crept into the larger bedroom first, turned back the plain gold quilted bedspread and pastel blue blankets of the double bed and sniffed the plain white sheets. As she had expected, they smelled of new fabric. There was no scent of human sweat or other odors that would suggest that the bed had ever actually been slept in. Her suspicions that the apartment was just a shill increased. She opened the single drawer on the cheap wood nightstand and found it empty. There was no clutter, or even a reading lamp to be found in the room. The only other piece of furniture was a small dresser with three drawers. She opened and examined each of them in turn and found a few items of clothing, perhaps enough for two full changes of a man's clothes, if he liked black. The built-in closet was completely empty, as she had expected.

She found the second bedroom similarly immaculate. Again, a bed, in this case a single with a similarly cheap bedspread, although this one was blue. Other than that there was only a nightstand and a small dresser. This bed also had never been slept in and the drawers were completely empty, as was the closet. She moved on towards the kitchen, but stopped in front of the bookcase. There were books on the shelves, which might shed some clues as to the occupant's interests. The top shelf intrigued her as it was filled with books on quantum physics, string theory and biology. There were many titles that interested her and that she would liked to have taken the time to read herself. If circumstances allowed, she promised herself that she would find a hole in time to come back and borrow some of them, or at least to write down the titles and look them up in a library, which would be considerably less risky.

The other two shelves of the bookcase were filled with mostly familiar science fiction and fantasy books. Some had to do with time travel, but most looked to be purely for entertainment. She smiled as she noted a particular series of books about dragonriders that were some of her own favorites, then remembered that the dragons in the story had the ability to travel through time and space in a similar fashion to her own abilities. She made a mental note of some of the less familiar titles on the shelf, speculating that some of them might contain similarly parallel references of use to her kind.

She moved on to the kitchen, which showed no immediate sign of use apart from the toaster and coffeemaker that sat on the clean, white countertop. The toaster actually had the hint of crumbs inside and the coffeemaker showed some slight brown stains from use. Akalya opened cupboards and found a set of plain dishes of the sort one might buy in a box in a supermarket and a similarly basic set of pans. The food cupboards held a few non-perishable staples; toaster pastries, canned tuna and instant noodles. The refrigerator contained only a half-empty small carton of milk, although the freezer compartment held boxes of individual serving pizzas and a loaf of sliced white bread.

That was the clincher. Nobody froze their bread unless they expected to use it infrequently. The place was provisioned for an occasional stop to check the mail, not as a home to live in. Marcus almost certainly had other digs somewhere, unless he lived a very simple and unhealthy lifestyle. Akalya wiped down any cupboard doors she had touched as well as the refrigerator door handle, using the velvet of her shawl. She began walking towards the bookcase with intent to examine the books further, then turned suddenly towards the front door as she heard the sound of a woman walking in heels approaching.

There was no time to think. Akalya ran for the bedroom rather than shifting as she wanted to be ready to shift from the concealment of the further room without delay. Her heart beat quickly as adrenaline surged through her body at the sound of a key in the lock and a slight squeal of unlubricated hinges. She brought to mind a visualization of Santa Monica Beach, where she had alighted from the bus, then she suddenly stopped and listened. Akalya's curiosity took over then as she heard the click of heels as the woman entered the kitchen, the only uncarpeted room in the apartment. Akalya wondered who the woman was and how she was connected to Marcus. There had been no indications of a woman occupant anywhere in the rooms she had investigated.

Akalya weighed her options; she could go ahead and shift out to safety, or she could try hiding from the woman and follow her progress through the apartment and maybe follow her when she left to find out more about her. She contemplated confronting her for a moment, but discarded the thought almost as quickly as it occurred. As much as she was tired of running in fear, she also didn't possess the kind of nerve that such a confrontation would require. She began to search her memory for images of nearby rooftops where she might observe the woman when she left the apartment, when she heard the distinctive bleeps of a cell phone being dialed. Akalya stopped and listened to one side of a conversation.

"Yeah, it's me."

"I don't know, as long as it takes I guess."

The confidence in the woman's contralto voice matched the sharp click of her steps. Akalya pigeonholed her in her own categorization as an 'executive type', the sort of woman you never wanted to work for. She was all business and gave the impression of being used to being in charge.

"Presumably he's meeting with the team. He's identified half a dozen subjects, enough for a good study."

"No, he hasn't worked it out. He's got his own agenda, as you know."

"I don't know, we'll deal with that when we get to it."

"Yes, he'll co-operate, just as long as we don't mention..."

"No, I don't think it would be wise to tell him about that. Marcus believes we're trying to help him, but he's no fool. If he knew about the project, he might guess our plans. He could even change sides. It's not worth the risk."

Akalya was intrigued by what she was hearing. It suddenly became important to learn the woman's name, in case she should find herself in a close encounter with Marcus at some point where information could be useful. She listened for the conversation to finish in case anything else of interest should be said as she prepared to shift.

"No, I won't. Mason, don't worry about that. He hasn't tried to touch me. I'm just a means to an end."

Akalya speculated about Marcus' touch. Somehow it could stop a shift... was this woman one of her people? Somehow Akalya didn't think so. Just the tone of her voice reeked of _Memlekel_.

The woman said a simple goodbye to her contact and Akalya shifted. Twenty minutes back was enough to place her in the moments before the woman arrived. As it happened, the bedroom she already stood in had a window that faced the road. The curtains were closed, as were all of the curtains in the apartment, and it was a simple matter to peer through a slight opening to watch as her executive woman intruder arrived.

She waited only a moment before a dark red car of some nondescript economy model pulled up by the curb in front of the apartment house. A woman with coiffed mousy-brown hair, wearing a sickly yellow skirt suit and white high heels got out and walked briskly towards the steps that would lead her up the stairs to the apartment. Akalya listened intently until the high heels sounded on the stairs, then distance shifted to the tree that grew through the pavement in front of the building. The car was parked conveniently close to it. She looked around quickly to ascertain that there were no casual observers, then she walked to the window close enough to see inside the car and shifted into the passenger seat.

A few moments riffling through a mess of papers and old chewing gum wrappers resulted in the eventual discovery of registration papers. Akalya kept looking up, all too aware that the phone call would take only a few minutes and the woman might come out afterwards, though Akalya hadn't stayed long enough to learn what the woman's next actions would be.

The name on the registration was Julia Swindon. Akalya found a half-broken pencil among the jumble of items in the glove box and scribbled Julia's address on a gum wrapper, then pocketed it and shifted to the end of the road, near another tree that would help conceal her sudden appearance from any onlookers. From there she time shifted back to 1965, then across distance to her own apartment in El Porto. At last she felt safe. She breathed out a sigh of relief that was long overdue. All the cloak and dagger shifting around had frayed her nerves as much as it had depleted her energy. She wanted a good meal and a rest, but first she just wanted to sit down and get her bearings in the one place that she felt secure.

Akalya flopped down into her easy chair and let her muscles relax, until her eye fell on a scrap of paper that was sitting on the side table where it shouldn't be. She felt the flush of adrenaline course through her exhausted body one more time as she recognized the chewing gum wrapper on her table as exactly the same variety that she had in her pocket with Julia's address scribbled on it. The flavor didn't exist in 1965.

### Chapter Seven

Have you ever been high on a mountain and felt as if time passed more slowly? It did. There are many theories and paradoxes in science that speculate on the nature of time travel and how it can affect the individual.

_Despite the name, the grandfather paradox does not exclusively regard the impossibility of one_ ' _s own birth. Rather, it regards any action that makes impossible the ability to travel back in time in the first place. The paradox_ ' _s namesake example is merely the most common example used when one considers the whole range of possible actions. If someone traveled back in time to kill Hitler, then the idea to do so would not occur because the Third Reich never happened. If a time traveler went back to sabotage the technology to allow time travel, then the technology would not exist in his own time to make the journey. That example is based on the assumption that a machine would be the means of time travel. Whoever thought of it obviously never experienced a time slip through a simple adjustment of the mind as my people are able to do._

_One of the side effects of altering one_ ' _s own brain wave frequency is known to the scientific world as gravitational time dilation. This is one of Einstein_ 's theories involving relativity, which was proven by more recent _tests of general relativity_. The idea is that _an actual difference of elapsed time will be measured between two events by observers differently situated from gravitational masses, in regions of different gravitational potential. The closer the time measuring device is to the source of gravitation, the more slowly time passes. What this means in the immediate context is that a moment of extreme significance in the perception of an observer can actually slow the movement of time. To anyone observing the observer, time will run normally. But to the person undergoing the effects of the moment of significance, several minutes might pass as the event is assimilated and a reaction is formulated between the analytical part of the brain and the part of the mind that controls physical reactions._

An eternity seemed to pass as Akalya worked up the courage to pick up the discarded chewing gum wrapper. Her eyes darted around the room, looking for any sign of intruders and seeking the subtle trails that would be perceptible to her other senses if someone had shifted in or out of her protected space. She felt no impressions.

She stood up and walked across the room, positioning herself next to the door to the balcony. She tested the door and found it still locked. Her eyes flitted up to the front door, where the security chain hung loosely across the latch that could only be locked from the inside. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out the gum wrapper with Julia's address scribbled on it. A second wrapper, stuck to the back of it, came loose in her hand. Akalya smiled as a suspicion began to cross her mind. She shoved both wrappers deeply back into her pocket.

Up until that moment, she had shied away from the table and the offending gum wrapper as if it were a trap that she need only touch to find it sprung. Akalya chuckled aloud as she contemplated the grandfather paradox, or the Bill and Ted paradox as she preferred to call it as she walked over to the table casually. She speculated that sometime in the future she would learn the information that she found written on the gum wrapper and would shift back to leave a note for herself. She picked it up, expecting to find her own handwriting staring back at her.

A wave of adrenaline coursed through her veins as unfamiliar handwriting met her eyes instead. It revealed the name Mason Andrews and an address in Brentwood, about four miles inland from Santa Monica Beach. Assuming this was the same Mason that had been speaking to Julia on the phone, Akalya surmised that he held substantial importance to her investigation. Her eyes darted around quickly, searching again for any sign of an intruder.

She was in no condition to follow up the clue right away. She desperately needed food and sleep, but the discovery of the unfamiliar handwriting meant that she also needed to disappear again. She dared not sleep in her rented house anyway when she was so tired, as the risk of waking up in her own time and being discovered by the 2015 occupants was extremely high.

A brief attempt to calculate how many hours she had been awake failed miserably. Then Akalya decided that it didn't matter. The energy required for the frequent shifting she had been doing negated counting normal time or setting her needs by such calculations. The simple fact was that she was exhausted and needed sleep, but more than that she needed food. A brief rummage in the left hand pocket where she kept local time currency for 1965 resulted in finding a five dollar bill. In 1965, she could eat well on that.

The short walk up to the main road where she could buy food at a cafe seemed daunting as she locked the door and walked down the steps to the street, but it would require much less energy than shifting. Besides, she loved the sea air. The sound of seagulls screeching from the ocean front touched some of her fondest memories of El Porto. She realized then that she had never felt quite at home anywhere since, yet that comforting feeling had been breached by the intrusion of a gum wrapper. Akalya looked at every shadow as she walked up to the top of Shell Street, looking for the most subtle signs of a shift in progress  the slight movement of particles in the air that only a shifter would recognize.

She entered a small cafe and sat down at a table on faded blue vinyl upholstered seats. The booth was meant to seat four, but it was not a busy time and the server didn't make any objection as she asked if Akalya wanted coffee. Despite her fatigue, Akalya refused the caffeinated drink and asked for apple juice and a salad with extra blue cheese dressing and crackers instead. She noted the odd expression on the middle-aged server's face, then she watched her walk behind the counter to get the salad. Akalya's eyes glanced up at a wall clock, noting that it read nine-thirty. Perhaps it was early for a salad, but she wanted something to replenish her calories quickly.

Akalya remembered that servers were still called waitresses in that era. The woman who brought her salad fitted the cliché, with her tightly curled brown hair, probably a wig, and pale blue uniform with a white apron. The woman's eye shadow looked as though it had been chosen to match the uniform, though her eye make-up was generally minimal. Akalya speculated that her waitress had probably worn pink lipstick at the beginning of her shift, but it had all been rubbed off now.

As the salad and packets of crackers were set before her, Akalya ordered bacon and eggs with hash browns and toast. Then she started to eat as if she hadn't had a meal in weeks. The apple juice and heavy calories in the blue cheese dressing revitalized her fairly quickly, but she still felt ravenously hungry after she had finished the last lettuce leaf. By then, the other food had been cooked and the waitress was on her way to deliver it to Akalya's table. Akalya ordered a strawberry milkshake to take with her.

Again, she ate the food quickly and felt her strength returning with every bite. She dipped the bacon into egg yolk, savoring it as if it were the most elegant fondue delicacy ever invented. She added a little salt to the hash browns, but nothing else. The shredded potatoes fulfilled her cravings more than anything else she had eaten. She slathered strawberry jam across the buttered toast and ate it last, leaving the crusts. They always seemed too dry to her and she had enjoyed her fill by then.

Akalya paid for her food and took the milkshake to drink on the way back to her beach house. Though it wasn't actually on the beach, the hill was steep enough to get a clear view of the sand and the ocean, even before she went up the stairs. She finished the last slurp of the milkshake as she reached into her pocket for the keys. A small piece of strawberry blocked the straw for a moment, giving testament to the genuine nature of a concoction made with real fruit rather than artificial flavoring as she could expect to find more commonly in her own time.

She entered as quietly as possible, remaining alert for any sign of intruders. Then she collected a blanket from the makeshift bed and went to the door to the balcony to choose a rooftop to shift to, where she was unlikely to be disturbed. She chose one across the road that didn't have obvious stairs to a roof patio, then shifted across. Just to make sure, she then shifted ahead to her own time, and was struck by how little everything changed. There was more noise from traffic on the street at the top of the hill, yet she could still hear the cries of the gulls echoing from the beach and the soft crashing of the waves that never changed, except when a storm caused them to become temporarily more violent.

She settled down under the blanket, protected from the bright sun of the day and the cool sea breeze, and quickly fell asleep. She slept deeply for a few hours, then was rudely awakened by someone pushing her with a shoe and shouting at her to wake up.

"Damn hippies!" A baritone male voice shouted in angry tones. "Get a job! You can't sleep on my roof, or any other roof on this street. You on heroin or something?"

"N-no," Akalya answered calmly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to trespass. I needed sleep, and it wasn't safe at home."

The man looked at her more closely then. He had a short, neat haircut, which was always a bad sign. Akalya speculated on what he might do for a living, and how her presence on his roof would appear to him. Probably as if a gypsy had taken advantage of an unprotected space. The pale blue track suit he wore looked new, and probably designer. Much of the beach area had long since been taken over by yuppies. Akalya could easily imagine a BMW in the garage downstairs.

"I don't see any bruises. Are the police looking for you?"

His eyes were not kind. Akalya watched as he pulled a cell phone out of his trouser pocket and began to dial. She didn't need any psychic power to guess that he was dialing the police.

"No," she answered. "The police don't have any interest in me whatsoever." As she spoke, she began to fade. The shift forward to midnight was a gamble, but Akalya was rewarded with an empty roof as she faded into the new time. She smiled, remembering the look of shock on the man's face as he had watched her disappear before his eyes. Then she distance shifted across to the roof of her own house, though it belonged to someone else in this time, and across to the next roof of a house that faced onto the next road, 43rd Street. She was still in view of the roof of her house, so shifted a little further to yet another roof across the street.

The problem was that most of the houses in the area had roof patios and might well be in use at any time, although if someone were going to have a party, it should have already been in progress that late at night. Akalya noted a nearby roof which was fitted out with solar panels. As they took up most of the space on the roof, she thought they would make that roof less likely to be used as entertainment space or frequented by the inhabitants. She shifted over to that one and wrapped up in her blanket again, a little away from the panels and from the place where she had landed on the roof. She had never encountered herself directly in all her time shifts, but she didn't want to be awakened by her own foot landing on her face if she should slip back to her own time stream as she slept.

### Chapter Eight

I felt a homesickness for a place to which I might never return; a home which maybe never was. The illusion of safety I had created with my bolt hole in the place of my childhood had been shattered with a simple scrap of rubbish, a reminder that others shared my ability to shift through time and space. The nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of the past tore at my soul. I had put a lot of effort into setting up my holiday home, only to have it breached by a reality intrusion.

Some have speculated that if we can remember the past, we should also be able to remember the future. Could the future hold anything or any place that could invoke the same longing as my innocent memories of El Porto in 1965? I thought it might be an experiment worth attempting, but not yet. There was too much to do. Too many strands to follow to put together the puzzle of what was happening, and why. Julia and Mason were still anonymous players of this game and I had no choice but to follow them to learn where their pieces fit into the jigsaw.

Meanwhile, the captives were depending on me. In 2015, they had probably already been moved to a new location. The enemy were intelligent enough to think of looking for observers on the rooftops. I would have to find another way.

Akalya woke as the first rays of sunlight spilled over the skyline of the city to the east. Her internal voice caught the thoughts that had drifted through her mind as she had slept, particularly one phrase; _Remember the future_.

She slipped out of the blanket that she had brought with her from 1965 and rubbed the cobwebs of sleep from her eyes, wondering if the cafe where she had eaten still existed and craving the coffee she had refused a few hours before... or fifty years ago depending on how you looked at it. She felt her friend Gaye tugging at her consciousness, which reminded her of the tag she had attached to her through the phone. Akalya was relieved to note that she had maintained her time shift and was still a few hours ahead of her natural time stream now. Just enough to make her movements a little less predictable to her opponents in this cat and mouse game where she was both the hunter and the hunted. She also had two addresses to follow up.

Whether the address for Mason was genuine or not bothered her a little. Until she learned who had left that clue for her, she had no way of knowing what side they were on or whether it might be a trap. Akalya wondered if they knew that she had Julia's address as well. With her mind clearing, she stood up from the roof carefully, observing all around her as discerningly as possible, then shifted to the street corner and quickly walked round to the main road, Highland Avenue. It was an old trick. Shift to a corner and walk around quickly enough, and anyone seeing a shifter appear would write it off as a trick of imagination while anyone in the line of sight around the corner would see an ordinary person walking from a side street.

Akalya remembered another popular saying among her people; _Time changes things, neighborhoods most of all_. The cafe had given way to a market and liquor store. However, there was a bus stop just a little further down the street. Once again, Akalya found herself taking a bus to the Los Angeles airport, where she could pick up the red line, an underground system that had been built since the times in which she had been travelling. She was back in her element and a system she knew. The red line would take her to Brentwood; close enough to the address she had for Julia. She thought briefly of the apartment that she kept in Lawndale and the job that she wouldn't show up for that evening, but she dared not go near places of her ordinary routine until she could be sure that her own capture wasn't awaiting her there. She resolved to call in sick as soon as she could get to a public telephone. Finding ones that used coins had become increasingly more difficult over the years, but a card could be more easily traced.

The airport proved ideal. Not only did they have a proliferation of public telephones, if you knew where to look, but the location was so central to transportation both near and far that it would give no clue whatsoever to her plans, should the call be traced. Akalya walked towards the domestic arrival terminals as soon as she got off the bus and made the call, listening carefully for any note of strangeness in her manager's voice as they spoke. She sniffed and coughed, suggesting that it was a nasty flu that would keep her out of work for several days. She hoped that it would be enough.

Again, she paid cash for her fare to get to Brentwood. Nothing traceable, like the fare cards known as TAP cards. People used those for convenience and reduced fares, but many didn't realize how easily their personal details could be traced and their movements followed if the right government agency wished to know. Whether she was dealing with a government agency, or someone who had access to their resources, was still an unknown factor.

She walked the remaining distance to the address she had scribbled on her gum wrapper, then stopped dead in her tracks as she recognized Julia's car parked on the street out front. She was approaching the lion's den now. She realized then that she hadn't made a plan, but she had no choice but to confront Julia and to give her a reason to divulge information. Things were about to get sticky.

Walking up to the front door felt like walking into an ancient Roman gladiator pit. The only alternative would have been to slink around the building and try to get a look inside a window until she could get a visual impression of a room to shift into. From the public street, visibility was clear and neighbors would certainly notice suspicious behavior and possibly call the police. Her only choice was to pick the lock and walk inside, as she had done at the decoy apartment. Akalya hoped that Julia didn't have a housekeeper or anyone else inside with her. She mentally prepared herself in case she should need to make a hasty retreat. A shift back to the time when Julia had been inside the apartment in Santa Monica would suffice nicely, as long as Julia lived alone.

Akalya turned the tumblers of the lock as quietly as possible. Unfortunately, when she pushed the door, she found that it had been bolted from the inside. Julia was security conscious. Short of ringing the doorbell, her only remaining alternative was to risk being seen looking into windows... unless she could find a back door. The property was surrounded by painted brick walls and the very thought of walking into an enclosed space to look for a way in was far too claustrophobic. Akalya though of another idea.

She turned and walked away from the door as if she had rung the doorbell and received no answer, then crossed the street and found a convenient tree on the pavement with a little shade. She walked into the shadow, turned, and shifted to the roof of Julia's house. Once again she had to rely on the common person's assumption that nothing was out of the ordinary if they should happen to lose sight of a person walking along who steps into a shadow and then cannot be seen again. On the roof she would be in plain sight of any observer, but people seldom looked up and she was only visible for a moment as she crept as quietly as possible to the back of the house, over the roof.

Akalya found that the walls enclosed a small courtyard with a swimming pool... and much more glass. Part of the house was squared around the patio and sliding glass doors that led into the house could be seen from her position on the roof. Akalya thought to herself that at least the neighbors would not see her from the relative privacy of the walled patio. However, the glass doors increased the risk of being seen from within as well as the opportunity to see inside so that she could make a distance shift.

Akalya had run out of choices. She shifted to the spot on the cemented patio nearest the glass doors, spotted a place on the carpet next to a bookcase inside and shifted into the house. Julia walked into the room at the same moment, saw what was happening and dived towards a side table with a small drawer, pulled out a pistol and squeezed the trigger. A look of dismay came over her face as the intruder suddenly disappeared just as the click from the empty pistol alerted her that someone, sometime, had unloaded the gun. Before Julia could formulate her next thought, Akalya was suddenly behind her and yanked her head back by the hair and put a knife to her throat. Julia felt a trickle down her thigh as she lost control of her bladder, ruining her best tailored silk skirt suit.

### Chapter Nine

My people are peaceful, but we can defend ourselves if we have to. Perhaps Julia had underestimated the advantages of time travel, or perhaps I had simply caught her off guard.

Having already prepared myself to shift back to a time when I knew that she would not be at home, I had been ready when she pulled the gun. Removing it would have been unwise as the convoluted rules of physics that run our universe required that it should be there when it had already been observed by us both. However, the status of the chamber and clip had not yet been established. I knew enough about guns to allow me to empty both, rendering the firearm harmless.

I had also taken the time to investigate further through Julia's house and even to enjoy some of the expensive food that she had stocked in her cupboards and refrigerator. It was the sort of thing that one finds in specialty shops or in upper class department store food sections. Crackers with olives baked in and chutney spreads with beer and spices; layered cream-filled cakes that looked as if they had come from an Italian bakery; sausages and cheese that I recognized from the Hickory Farms shops that could still be found in some shopping malls.

I didn't know whether she was planning to entertain or if she always kept yuppie food on hand, but I enjoyed the delicacies and refreshed my strength with the calories before stepping into a position right behind where I had left her. I took the knife from the sheath I keep strapped to my waist and thigh under my skirts before slipping back to the moment just after I had shifted away. One second I was disappearing before her, and the next I was behind her with a blade to her throat. I knew that I didn't have it in me to actually harm her, but she had no way of knowing that. I held the knife closely to the artery pulsing on her neck as I questioned her.

"Why are you after my people?" Akalya whispered in a menacing tone. Julia's eyes darted around the room quickly, seemingly looking for a means of escape. Her hesitation irritated Akalya, and the knife pushed deeper into sensitive skin, nearly breaking the surface.

"It's for research... to learn how you do it. The skill to slip through time would be invaluable to the human..."

"Who do you work for?" Akalya interrupted. Julia swallowed. Akalya could see that whatever she answered would be a lie.

"A special government research group. As I was saying, it's all for the betterment of mankind..."

Julia almost fell backwards as the woman holding her at knifepoint suddenly disappeared, then reappeared in front of her just long enough to slap her across the face. Julia had no time to react to the sudden sting as Akalya blinked out again, then pulled Julia's hair from behind once more to replace the knife at her throat.

"I didn't come here for lies. Who is Marcus and how does he stop the others from shifting?"

Julia looked confused.

"He's one of you. I don't know how it works, I only know that he can stop you."

This much was no surprise. At least it had the ring of truth.

"Who do you work for?" Akalya repeated. "The truth this time." Akalya poked the sharp end of the blade into the skin far enough to draw a thin line of redness to emphasize her intent.

Julia hesitated for just a heartbeat, her eyes shifting around the room in terror. The short demonstration of a Time Shifter's advantage had been sufficient to break her false confidence.

"I work for Darren Tate," Julia admitted. Akalya recognized the name of one of the richest entrepreneurs in America.

"What does he want from us? How does he know about us?"

This time Julia appeared to struggle to find answers from limited knowledge rather than through an attempt to concoct fabrications.

"I don't know how he knows. I presume he wants to be able to do what you do. I could guess at his reasons but he's never actually told me. I'm just a personal assistant."

"How did you get Marcus to co-operate?" Akalya was on a roll and kept asking questions, hoping to piece together as much of the puzzle as possible before Julia lost her co-operative spirit.

"Darren recruited him. I was only introduced to him in an office in New York. I don't ask questions, it's not in my job description." A note of rebellion had entered Julia's voice. Akalya could see that she would get little more from the woman.

"Who is Mason?"

Julia's eyes widened at that question.

"How do you know about Mason?"

"I'm asking the questions," Akalya asserted irritably. "Tell me where he fits in."

Julia hesitated only a split second before she answered defiantly.

"Mason is the one who's going to dissect you."

The statement had its desired effect. Akalya loosened her hold on Julia for just the blink of an eye, but it was enough for the callous woman to spin round and drop her center of gravity while pushing her attacker's knife hand out of reach of her throat. The two women struggled for control of Akalya's weapon hand as the battle of words continued.

"Marcus was only the first," Julia bluffed. "The others will co-operate when they see what we have to offer."

Akalya was not fooled by the insincerity in Julia's boasts.

"You have nothing that we need," she answered calmly. Then she disappeared  to Julia's eyes. In fact she had shifted over distance, to a back alley behind a street in a bad neighborhood in New York City. She had a target now; someone at the heart of the matter who would have the answers to all of her questions. The building with his name on it was on a corner by Central Park. The location of his office was no secret, but he would likely be surrounded with protection. Bodyguards, more personal assistants and gods know how many other hangers-on.

Akalya looked around the alley as she lifted her skirt to replace the knife into its sheath. Too late, she saw the eyes of a dirty, bearded man slumped against a wall, reeking of cheap alcohol... watching her. One of the many homeless of the cities, Akalya assumed. She hoped that the brief flash of firm skin on her thigh had brought him some small pleasure in his miserable life.

Without another thought about what he might have seen when she had first appeared, she walked out to the street and headed straight for the nearest subway entrance. She hadn't been to New York many times, but public transportation in major cities always proved to be easy to navigate. A short ride about a mile south of where she had materialized and then across the river would bring her to Central Park. That would leave her shift trail cold, but then the real challenge would be at hand. How to get close to a rich man surrounded by people in a building where there would be guards at night as well as during the day.

### Chapter Ten

_What can you say to a man with influence, the kind of power that money can buy, as he seeks to rob you of what capability you have to control your own life? Our abilities had never been used for greed or mindless gain, but only for survival. What we took, we used_  _like an animal that kills for food, rather than for sport... as mankind has done over the centuries._

_Would I have to invade a men_ 's toilet to catch this elevated person alone for just a moment? I could think of better ways to approach a man. This train of thought began to form into the glimmer of a plan; a way in which I might introduce myself to our Mister Tate without setting him on his guard, or putting him in a position where he would feel the need to call for his protectors.

Unfortunately, our abilities do not extend to seeing through walls or to reading minds. I had no way of knowing where he would be at any given moment or predicting when he might be alone for just a little while. I presumed that the building was equipped with cameras and staff to monitor them. Finding my way around inside was not going to be easy. Getting close to this man would be more complicated still. Like most rich men, he was likely to have a beautiful woman hanging off his arm if he wasn't actively working.

I bought a pair of sunglasses and sat in Central Park for hours, surreptitiously watching the entrance to the Tate building. At last my waiting was rewarded with a glimpse of my quarry... my hunter. I felt like Mata Hari as I chose my target from among the staff who surrounded him, taking note of the license plate number of the limousine in which they drove away. Finding the number of the telephone in that limo would be difficult for most people, but one of the advantages of working in invisible jobs over many years was that you learn how things work. I had been a switchboard operator once, before technology had made such employment all but obsolete.

Of this secret I will not speak. Let us just say that unlisted numbers are not impossible to obtain. Once obtained, the location of a vehicle with a telephone could be determined... if you knew someone who worked for the right agency. Our people are everywhere. This secret, at least, appeared to be one of which Mister Tate was not yet aware.

The chauffeur had finished his work for the day. He worked the mornings, polishing the black limo that he kept always ready in case Mister Tate had business to get to through the early hours of the day. When five o'clock came, he was off duty. The rich man's evening staff were always on time, ready to take over the tireless entrepreneur's needs and to transport him wherever he wished to conduct his playboy social life.

They can have that, Cecil thought to himself as he brushed his fingers through his dark, wavy hair in the bathroom mirror. The bar beyond the door might be working class, but at least the women were real, unlike the plastic Barbie doll gold-diggers who followed his rich employer around. Cecil had no use for that sort of woman. Though he had passed the ripe age of thirty-five, he still held hope that he would find a woman that he could settle down with eventually. Someone who would care for him for himself, rather than trying to use him to get closer to Tate.

That was why he frequented the lower east side bars, hoping to find someone who would find his half-Italian features exotic and his good salary a bonus rather than a stepping stone to greater ambitions. The dark skin that he had inherited from his African-American father could be a deterrent with some women, but he didn't want a bigot anyway. He looked upon his mixed heritage as a filtering system. His long-lashed, almond-shaped eyes looked back at him from the mirror. If a woman could resist those on the basis of the hue of his skin, he thought to himself, then she just wasn't good enough for Cecil Williams. His dark brown hair fell in ringlets to his shoulders. The Italian made black suit doubled as work clothes and evening wear, complimenting his toned body while exuding a sense of style.

Satisfied with his appearance, Cecil turned and pushed the door open to enter the trendy bar. He strode confidently through the crowded patrons towards his favorite table against the far wall, stopping a petite barmaid with short, dark curls along the way to order a bourbon and coke. As he sat down with his back to the wall, his eyes scanned the other clientele. A part of him knew that a bar wasn't an ideal place to find the woman of his dreams, but he didn't know where else to look. His mother had suggested church, but he didn't want some pious Bible thumper who would be more interested in saving his soul than sharing his bed. He did want children, but more than that, he wanted passion.

Perhaps it was only a dream of romance, but Cecil wanted a woman whose sun would rise and set only for her love for him. Love didn't come in a pay packet. Perhaps it didn't come in a bottle either, but somewhere, he was sure, a woman who wouldn't otherwise frequent bars was out looking for a man like him, to fall into his deep, dark brown eyes and become his woman forever.

The barmaid brought the drink quickly. There were perks to becoming a regular at a drinking establishment. If the staff recognized your face, they made that little extra effort to keep you sweet. The barmaid  Cindy, Cecil remembered  would receive a nice tip when she brought the next drink, unasked. She knew his routine, though tonight he was hoping to deviate from the usual pattern.

A woman in a tight beige skirt suit sat on a stool up at the bar itself. Cecil's eyes flicked past her so quickly that he couldn't have described her a moment later. The ones who sat at the bar were here for the booze, or selling their wares. His gaze next fell on an attractive brunette who had just entered through the front door. She was looking from left to right, as if she were unfamiliar with the layout of the place and determining which way to go.

Cecil contemplated introducing himself. He actually stood up, intending to walk over to her, but suddenly another woman across the room shouted to her and the brunette smiled and rushed over to join what appeared to be a hen party. Cecil was about to sit down again, when a woman next to him that he had not noticed lightly touched his elbow and began to speak to him.

"Pardon me, but there are no single tables and the place is packed. Is that chair taken?" The woman indicated the other chair at his small table. It was just the sort of approach that Cecil would expect from a woman trying to get close to his employer, but this woman didn't look the type. She was dressed in sort of a Gypsy fashion, with long flowing velvet skirt layers and a simple dark purple blouse, gathered at the neck opening and the ends of the long sleeves. The dark blues and purples she wore all but disappeared in the flashing lights of the bar, but her long, wavy brown hair drew his attention.

"Please, join me," he invited her. He sat again as well and tried not to stare as he examined his new companion. He was finding it difficult to determine the color of her eyes in the perpetually changing light of the room. "Can I buy you a drink?"

The woman lowered her eyes and smiled slightly, looking very shy.

"Please don't misunderstand, I don't come on to men in bars. You just seemed... approachable."

Cecil flashed his most winning smile. He found himself genuinely warming to the woman and dropping his usual mechanisms that kept women who approached him at a distance. When he offered the second time, his voice dropped an octave and sounded softer and more sincere.

"My name is Cecil, and I promise I won't make any assumptions if you'll let me buy you a friendly drink."

He was rewarded with a shy smile and an affirmative nod of the woman's head. His hand was in the air signaling the barmaid before the unusual woman could voice her preferred beverage.

"I'm Kalli. May I have an apricot brandy sour please?"

The barmaid arrived at that moment.

"An apricot brandy sour for the lady please, Cindy." Cindy looked at Kalli quizzically.

"Apricot brandy, sour mix, blended with ice, pineapple slice and a cherry," Kalli supplied, then shrugged. "I'm older than I look."

Cindy controlled a smile, understanding what the woman meant. Drinks followed fashions as fickle as trends in clothing. A sour was a drink from an age that predated the fad for trendy bars with coconut liqueur concoctions and Alco-pops. The barmaid disappeared into the crowd, leaving Cecil and Kalli to continue getting to know one another.

"So, Kalli," Cecil began. "You don't strike me as the sort of woman who spends her time in a place like this. What's brought you here tonight?"

Kalli looked shyly at her hands before looking up again to answer.

"Funny enough, I wanted a drink. I had a bad day at work. I had forgotten how uncomfortable it can feel to be a woman alone in a bar, even one like this."

Cecil had to control his excitement. The woman seemed completely genuine.

"What kind of work do you do?" he asked her.

"I'm a PA," she answered quickly. "I dress in office clothes and spend my day running and fetching for an overpaid executive, then at night I slip into my Gypsy clothes and let my true self come out."

Cecil smiled broadly.

"We got something in common there, girl. I work for an exec too, but mostly I look after his car during the day, unless he needs a ride somewhere."

"You're a chauffeur?"

"And general dog's body. Sometimes I have to do things for him that feel wrong, like finding him a woman companion to swim with him in that big pool of his up on the thirty-third floor today."

Kalli's eyes lit up. Cecil noted the sudden interest and his suspicions began to return. Somehow he had been maneuvered far too close to talking about his employer. Kalli noted a subtle change in his expression.

"I love swimming," Kalli explained, keeping her voice smooth and casual. "Are you ever allowed to use the pool? The public ones in this city are so noisy and crowded, a private pool sounds heavenly."

Cecil relaxed again, mentally chiding himself for being so defensive.

"That one is off limits to me, pretty lady. I'd love to find a nice pool to take you to sometime though."

Kalli smiled.

"I'd like that," she cooed, looking up into his eyes for the first time. For a moment he was sure that her eyes were green, then he changed his mind and decided they were brown.

Before he could be sure, the barmaid returned with their drinks and Kalli broke the connection, reaching for a sip of the frothy concoction in what looked like an oversized wine glass with fruit on a plastic spear at the side. His own drink was much more simple in an ordinary straight-sided tumbler glass.

"What do you do while your boss is swimming?" Kalli asked casually.

"Stay out of the way, mostly," was the reply. "I polish the car, or maybe read a book if I like. He wants his time private. I'm sure you understand what I mean."

Kalli looked down again, frowning. Cecil feared that he might have embarrassed her.

"How do you find these women who swim with him?" Kalli asked abruptly.

"Rich men attract women like flies," he said a little more sharply than he had intended. "If that's what this is about, you best tell me now. Cecil don't like being taken for no fool."

The change in his manner and dialect appeared to startle Kalli. She slurped up her drink quickly and stood to leave.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean... I wasn't trying to..." Kalli stammered her words, flustered.

"I'm not what I seem," she finished more clearly, then she slipped into the crowd. Cecil tried to follow her, intending to apologize. He was sure now that he had made a mistake and the woman wasn't trying to use him at all. He could not find her in the crowd. She seemed to have disappeared somehow.

"Damn!" Cecil exclaimed as he returned to his table, just as Cindy was taking away the empty glass from the apricot sour. "Get me one of those, and keep the change." Cecil slapped a twenty note onto the barmaid's tray and dropped himself back into his chair, gulping the rest of his bourbon and coke.

### Chapter Eleven

It is not in my nature to use people. However, given good cause, all ethics are subject to becoming no more than guidelines. Cecil was a nice guy. Too nice. I think that if I had allowed myself to get to know him better, I might have liked him a lot. That would have been awkward, considering my plans to use his information to arrange a little private time with his employer.

_Besides, I had no desire to live in New York. I_ ' _ve always been a California girl at heart, wherever my travels might take me. There was also the ever-present issue of Memlekel, and the wisdom that discouraged entering into close relationships with them. It simply got too complicated too easily and was a risk to all of our kind if one of them should learn about us._

_This train of thought somehow brought me back to Marcus. A suspicion began to formulate in my mind_  _one that I could only verify if I were to get close enough to him to have a conversation, though much could be learned through public records. Getting physically close to him still held the risk of getting captured through whatever facility it was that allowed him to prevent my people from shifting._

_Despite the risks, I had only one choice. I would soon return to the west coast and continue my investigations inside the lion_ 's den. _I had just one thing to do first. Tate was the key to answering that all-important question; why._

Entering an unfamiliar high-rise building posed unique problems, but nothing insurmountable. Akalya looked up at the higher floors from her position at the edge of the park, scanning the rows of darkened glass until she found what she sought; scaffolding. A building with a lot of glass required a constant routine of window washing. Akalya admired the nerves of the men who balanced on a few planks of suspended wood to accomplish the job, but of course they had safety procedures and secured belts to prevent falls. She would have no such safety apparatus, but she need only balance on the scaffolding for a moment to accomplish her purpose.

In the shadow of a tree, she walked round the trunk as she shifted back to lunch time that same day. As she had hoped, some of the scaffolding was suddenly empty, though window washers had a tendency to eat their sandwiches right there on their precarious perches. Akalya found an empty platform that wasn't close enough to others for the occupants to notice her momentary presence. She shifted up to the scaffold she had marked and grabbed the suspension rope with one hand as she used the other to shield her eyes against the dark glass, so that she could see inside past the reflections in the glass. In the time that it took for a girl in the office to start to look up at the shape in the window, Akalya shifted across the corridor to the entrance of another office and walked out of the doorway as if she had just left that office, striding confidently past the rows of cubicles occupied by disinterested clerical staff. She reached the elevators at the end of the corridor without drawing more than a passing glance from anyone.

Cecil had said that the pool was on the thirty-third floor. Akalya hoped that no special key was required to make the elevator stop on the private floor. That would complicate things. As it happened, the security for the floor took a different form. The elevator doors opened onto a spacious, off-white painted reception area with a smartly dressed woman waiting behind a long, white desk. Two leather chairs, also white, sat by the window to the left. Even the woman's tailored skirt suit was a light color, though her eyes were a steely, penetrating blue. Her perfect, short, lacquered hair reminded Akalya of a chestnut-brown version of Maggie Thatcher. The room felt stark and the woman intimidating, which Akalya suspected was the intent. There was no choice but to bluff and hope for the best. Akalya steeled her nerves and walked directly up to the desk, looking the woman in the eye.

"Mister Tate is expecting me," she said to the receptionist without blinking. It was one of the many skills that her people were taught very young. A steady, unblinking stare would disconcert most people, at least a little. Even if they didn't show it, an element of doubt could be introduced into the situation.

"Mister Tate already has a swimming partner," the woman returned, matching Akalya's steady stare with a steely-blue one of her own.

"He wanted two today," Akalya insisted as she reached out and gently touched the back of the receptionist's hand. Half an hour passed in a blink without any obvious indication. "Perhaps it was tomorrow, I'll check downstairs."

With a swish of her skirts, Akalya sashayed back into the elevator and closed the doors before the woman could question her further, then she shifted back twenty-nine minutes. The elevator had not yet left the floor for other passengers, but the receptionist was no longer at her desk. Akalya smirked as she walked past the desk to explore the rooms behind the neutralized security station. It only took a moment to hear the resonance of someone moving around in a back room that had that distinct echo of water that inevitably reverberated from changing rooms next to a pool.

Akalya followed the sound and soon came into a room with several lockers along the wall and a bench for sitting. There were three shower stalls to the right, and a naked young woman sitting on the bench and bent over to reach for something in a canvas bag. The young woman might have felt a light touch on her back. She might have even sat up suddenly to find no one there. Akalya didn't waste time considering the girl's reaction to finding no one there. Like the receptionist, she suddenly lost half an hour of time, though she would probably never notice it.

Left alone with the girl's bag, Akalya had a quick look through the assorted belongings and noted that the bag did not contain a bathing suit, only cosmetics and personal items. Akalya wondered if Tate was expecting that girl specifically as she disrobed and left her silks and velvets neatly draped across the bench. If she had understood Cecil correctly, the playboy would only be expecting an attractive naked woman who could swim. He was probably expecting one closer to twenty than Akalya appeared, but by the time he could confront Cecil, Tate would know that it hadn't been a blunder by the chauffeur.

Akalya swallowed her self-consciousness and stepped out into a spacious swimming room. The tiles that surrounded the pool were of a Greek inspired design, beige with sea green and blue geometric markings that made the flooring look like genuine mosaic marble. The walls were decorated with huge murals embedded into tiled walls, showing scenes of an ancient forum and of chariot races from another age. The pool itself glowed blue, obviously painted on the inside and accented with soft, colored lights. The rounded steps into the shallow end were just in front of her and at the other end in the deeper water swam her quarry, naked and vulnerable.

Akalya smiled at him, then swiveled her hips seductively as she stepped slowly into the comfortably warm water. She noted the details of the room so that she could return sometime when it was unoccupied to enjoy a leisurely swim. The cameras wouldn't matter then. Her secret was effectively already out. Tate swam slowly towards her, apparently pleased with what he saw and intending to meet her halfway.

They met just before the middle of the pool, where the water was waist deep and they could stand up to face each other. Tate reached for her, fondling her breasts with the confidence of a man who was used to having his way with women who considered it a privilege to be allowed to please him.

"What's your name?" he asked, as he reached to gently stroke her between her legs. Akalya tried to ignore the inescapable feelings of arousal as she allowed the familiarity and wrapped a leg around the billionaire. She held him close and leaned towards his ear to whisper her answer.

"Does it matter?"

Twenty years slipped away and the ardor of the businessman turned to panic as he clutched the naked woman tightly while they both plummeted through the air. The Tate building had not been built yet on the current site in 1995. Akalya held Tate tightly and distance-shifted to the pavement, in full sight of bystanders. She winked at him and disappeared, then a moment later reappeared, fully dressed.

Tate's eyes shifted everywhere, looking for any means of escape. There was nowhere to go, and people were staring as they walked past. Akalya stepped forward and gripped his arm as he attempted to cover his genitals with his hands.

"As you've asked, my name is Akalya. I am of the Harekaiian. I can take you back to your time, but I want to know why you are hunting me. I want to know many things."

"Can we talk somewhere more private?" Tate pleaded with his eyes as well as his words.

Akalya nearly laughed at the man's total vulnerability. A moment before he had been a powerful, rich man in his own protected environment. Standing naked on a busy street in New York in a time where he was unknown had shaken him even more than the fall from the thirty-third floor, which at least had only lasted for a second or two. Akalya had him where she wanted him.

She took him forward to midnight, the night before he would encounter her in the pool. The streets of New York were still busy, but at least it was dark and only a few people witnessed his embarrassment as Tate stood naked in front of the building that bore his name. Most would think they had imagined it. In the next blink of an eye, Akalya had moved them to the floor in front of the reception desk where the woman would challenge her in a few hours.

"Please, sit down," Akalya invited him, gesturing to his own chairs. Still naked, Tate avoided her touch as he walked over to the stark white chairs and sat down in one of them. He squirmed, crossing his legs to hide his nakedness from the large windows that looked out over the city, though he must have known that he would be invisible to anyone outside. The windows were treated with a chemical that filtered sunlight and reflected on the outside, so that the public saw only mirror images of the city buildings in the rows of office windows on the Tate building.

"My first question is why," Akalya began, taking charge of the dynamics between them quickly. "Why do you have thugs capturing my people?"

Tate looked at her with apprehension in his eyes. It didn't require a lot of experience in reading people to see that he was considering his answer carefully. He looked away, back outside of the window before he answered.

"I want what you have. No one is to be hurt, but we need to study them... to learn how it works."

"You can let them go then," Akalya said in a matter-of-fact tone. "There is a difference in brain chemistry. You don't learn it, you're born with it, or you're not. You can never be like me."

Tate nodded. Whether he entirely believed her was yet to be seen. Akalya didn't understand the theory any more than Tate probably did, but the important thing was that he had no way of knowing that it was only a theory. Some of the Harekaiian had studied their own unique abilities, but not to the extent of dissecting comparative brain tissue samples. That sort of research could not occur so long as they had to keep themselves hidden from the Memlekel, or as long as there was any danger that scientists would become impatient waiting for one of the time shifters to die of natural causes.

"I've suspected as much," Tate continued. "My back-up plan is to recruit employees. People with time travel abilities who would help me to... predict the outcome of certain investments."

Akalya shook her head in disbelief.

"And you think that kidnapping people and hobbling their shifting abilities is going to win you recruits?"

"Your people don't communicate with each other a lot. We have others in our records who know nothing of the research operation in California."

Tate turned and looked at Akalya steadily as he revealed part of the scope of his operation. Akalya was certain that there had to be much more that he would not explain, but even hearing this much of Tate's plans made her hands shake in something that balanced between rage and fear. The man knew far too much. Worse, somewhere he had records of many of her people.

"You have Marcus," Akalya stated quickly. "Why don't you just use him to get your stock tips?"

"I have no hold on him." Tate's mouth scowled as he made the admission.

"How did he come to be in your employ?"

"Does it matter?" Tate clearly wasn't going to fall for rapid fire questioning.

"It matters to me."

Their eyes locked in a battle of wills. Akalya had remained standing over the exposed man sitting in the chair. His efforts to avoid her touch, and any attendant surprises, kept him virtually a prisoner in the expensive white leather chair. His naked flesh stuck to the leather periodically, adding to his discomfort. Only a moment passed in this silent battle of wills before Tate gave in and broke the silence.

"I have information about his background."

Another moment passed in silence.

"And?" Akalya prompted when she had grown tired of waiting. The internal struggle was apparent as the rich man wrung his hands in consternation. Whatever information he had about Marcus, Akalya could see that he didn't want to disclose it.

"Damn it, woman!" Akalya took a step backwards at the sudden outburst. "Ask me something else. Marcus' business is his own."

Akalya could see that she had hit on a nerve, but she decided to glean some other information before she came back to the subject of Marcus.

"Who's Julia? What is her position in your company?"

Tate waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal.

"Just an underling. She does what she's told."

"Who's Mason?"

Tate looked at her with a confused expression.

"There's no one named Mason involved with this."

Every detail of his expression and body language suggested that he was telling the truth. Akalya waited a moment to decide her angle, then decided that truth might uncover more truth.

"Julia made a telephone call to someone named Mason. They discussed the capture of my people. Could one of the scientists involved be named Mason?"

Tate shook his head and looked genuinely concerned.

"I personally hand-picked every man or woman that has anything whatsoever to do with this operation. It has been kept very quiet within a select group of people that I could... that I thought I could trust."

"It seems we could both benefit from sharing information," Akalya stated. "Now tell me about Marcus."

Again, Tate struggled for a moment, then he relented.

"Marcus isn't like you. At least his mother wasn't. As far as I know, he can't move through time and space. He has his own reasons for wanting to know how it works."

Akalya considered this new information for a moment.

"How does he stop us from shifting?"

"I don't know." Tate answered too quickly, shaking his head. Akalya was sure he was telling the truth. "Maybe you should ask him, next time you see him."

A sinister glint had entered into the expression in Tate's eyes. Akalya decided that they had both had enough. She stepped forward and lightly touched his shoulder while he was off-guard. The night turned to day, but only Akalya knew that it was now precisely fifteen minutes since she had first entered the pool with him. The receptionist was due to apparate at any moment.

"Have a nice swim," Akalya said, then suddenly they both splashed into the pool from just above the water surface. Tate, surprised by the abrupt change in environment, gasped for air as he broke back through the surface. He looked around, but Akalya had already gone. A young, naked redhead appeared from the door to the changing rooms and smiled shyly as she entered the pool. Tate suddenly felt hungry and not in the mood for swimming, or anything else involving a woman.

### Chapter Twelve

Having to lie naked in the sunshine while my clothing was laid out to dry was not a hardship. Though I was not a sunbather by nature, I gloried in the act of deliberate relaxation after the most recent events and the partially successful quest for information.

I needed more, but it could wait. Time was my playground, after all. I chose to rest in a time just a couple of years before my natural time stream. The summer had been warm and the roofs of the beach houses provided a reasonable degree of privacy. There might have been the odd helicopter flying over, but these would not find anything unusual in a local resident sunbathing on the roof. In fact, it was probably something the pilots looked for when they had a few spare minutes.

I was hungry again because of all the shifting, but I was also weary. I made a mental note that I really should carry energy bars or something if I was going to keep indulging in this cloak and dagger stuff. Part of me wanted to walk away from it all, now that I had demonstrated to the man in charge that he was pursuing something that could easily be taken out of his control. However, I would need to follow-up on what had happened to the captives. I also had that niggle in the back of my mind that Mason had been an unknown factor to Tate. Something more was afoot than the simple research project that I had uncovered, and my only connection to it was Julia.

First, I needed to rest.

Akalya languished in the warm sunlight and soon drifted off to sleep. She had never been able to sleep deeply in daylight and partly woke every time a seagull cried too closely overhead. She had chosen to rest in this way intentionally, guarding against an accidental shift by sleeping only in a light phase of unconsciousness.

Suddenly she half-wakened from a sleep that had been deeper than she had intended. The sun was still shining, but had moved significantly across the sky and had begun to lower towards the colorful horizon of the Pacific Ocean. She became vaguely aware of the pink and purple celestial reflections as her eyes slowly opened, then focused on a figure leaning over her.

Memory flooded back in an instant. She was naked... vulnerable. Her time sense told her that she had remained in the time frame she had selected, yet the face of Marcus, whom Tate had assured her could not time shift, was inches from her own, looking into her eyes. He reached his hand gently to the side of her face and touched her gently. In that instant, Akalya felt the spectrum of possible time and space shifts open to her senses. She was frozen in that moment, unable to move through either. Then suddenly it was as if a window to a portal closed and Marcus withdrew his hand.

"That is how it works," he explained. "I can open the possibilities, but I cannot step forward into any of them."

Akalya felt confused. If he could not time shift, then how could he...

"How did you come here?"

Marcus smiled gently and stroked her face again, this time without opening the time portals.

"You brought me," he replied. Then suddenly he was kissing her, deeply and passionately as if they had been lovers for some time. Akalya could not help but respond, feeling the fires within her exposed body ignite in response to his touch. Then he withdrew and stood up. She was freed and might have shifted away from him, but she felt no urgency to do so.

"I am not your enemy, Kalli." The words sounded sincere, but it was the expression in his dark, nearly black eyes that made her believe him. "I have brought you food."

He stepped aside, revealing a white paper bag that had been set down by his feet. Akalya could smell sweet and sour Chinese, her favorite. Without another word, Marcus smiled and walked down the stairs that connected the roof to the house below them. Akalya tried to reconcile what had just happened with everything that she had learned before. Was she to fall in love with Marcus sometime in the future? When did this happen... or does it? Was it one-sided? Could she believe him when he said that he was not her enemy?

Akalya shook the cobwebs of sleep from her mind and reached for the food. Special fried rice, sweet and sour chicken and even one of the crumbly almond cookies that she loved along with a fortune cookie. It was exactly what she would order for herself. She forced herself to eat slowly, though she was completely famished. Apart from the enjoyment of the cuisine, Akalya was very aware of the effects on digestion from bolting food too fast. Shifting through time with indigestion was something that few of her people wished to experience a second time.

With evening falling, the breeze was beginning to become chill. Akalya dressed, grateful to find that her heavy velvets had dried completely in the sun. All the while her mind kept turning over and over what had happened and what she knew so far. The strange encounter with Marcus complicated everything, yet her primary goal for the moment was to find out how Mason fit in. For that, she would need to pay another visit to Julia.

Akalya finished her meal and struggled again to reconcile all the pieces of information she had learned so far. She reached out her awareness to try to find the tag she had formed with Gaye. The rapid shuffling through time had made the connection fade significantly, but a glimmer of familiarity told Akalya that her friend was just a few miles away. She debated a distance shift, following the tag. It would be a dangerous move.

Akalya considered alternatives for several minutes, eventually deciding that she could play hot and cold for part of the way, shifting across distances and noting whether the tag felt stronger or weaker from different locations until she got close enough to follow on foot. The sense of Gaye had come from the direction of Los Angeles. A familiar location immediately came to mind  the roof of Julia's house in Brentwood.

Akalya took the time to dispose of the rubbish from her takeout meal down at the beach where large oil barrels had been used as trash receptacles for as long as she had known El Porto Beach. Then she shifted to the familiar rooftop, crouching low so that she would not be noticed by passers-by.

The awareness of Gaye was much stronger. She was still some distance away, but certainly getting closer. Akalya searched her memory for another location to shift to next that would be closer still. The UCLA campus came to mind. It was in the right direction.

Just at that moment, Akalya heard a splash from the pool in the back yard. Someone was swimming at Julia's house. She moved slowly, creeping across the roof quietly until she got close enough to the edge to see the pool. She had expected to find Julia there, but instead a man swam alone as if he was used to making himself at home in Julia's home and recreation facilities. The possibilities swam before Akalya's consciousness. Julia might have a boyfriend or...

Akalya decided to take a calculated risk. She shifted to the familiar position by the table where Julia kept her pistol in the drawer and looked around quickly, ascertaining that Julia hadn't been in the room to see the Time Shifter apparate. The thought that the gun might have been reloaded occurred to Akalya. She opened the drawer and slid the pistol into one of her deep skirt pockets.

Then she opened the sliding glass door as the man dived under water. She strode outside, waiting for him to surface again. His head bobbed up, facing away from Akalya, and he shook his hair of excess water. Akalya chose that moment to catch him off-guard before his eyes cleared of chlorine.

"Mason," she called in her best imitation of Julia's voice. The head swiveled towards her sharply in the way of someone answering to their own name. Akalya shifted back to the roof before Mason could react to the unexpected figure calling his name. She peered over the edge of the roof and watched as Julia ran outside and an animated conversation took place between the co-conspirators. Akalya didn't know what their game was, but the fact that Tate had known nothing of Mason told her that something sinister was going on between them. Following someone was no easy task, but if she could learn something about Mason, she would at least have a trail to find the others.

Julia and Mason rushed inside the house. Akalya wished she could predict what rooms they would be in, as she had toured Julia's house well enough to shift within hearing range if she only knew where they would be. Instead she shifted to the other side of the roof where she could see the street side. Two cars were in the drive. One was Julia's. Akalya assumed the other must be Mason's. She could not predict which they might take if they had it in mind to go somewhere in response to being discovered, but Akalya had another plan. She shifted to a crouching position behind the unfamiliar car and quickly memorized the license plate, then shifted to a familiar place where she could access a computer; the UCLA student library.

Nobody noticed the woman in Gypsy-like attire as she walked around the corner of a floor to ceiling bookshelf. Students of various ages and descriptions meandered throughout the library, dressed in an array of styles, some of which were far more eye-catching than Akalya's simple velvet attire.

Akalya knew this library well. She went straight to one of the library assistants who was returning books to a shelf from a library trolley and whispered the license plate number into her ear. The woman, like Akalya, was dressed in muted blues and purples, though her short skirt and buttoned blouse were more appropriate to her employment. The girl was smaller than Akalya, almost elfin. Her dark hair swirled around her shoulders, hiding her face when she looked down. She did not look up at Akalya, but walked casually to a desk with a computer and started typing in information and codes.

She was soon rewarded with the information she sought; the address and other personal details of one Mason Andrews. The girl fumbled for a notepad, but could not find one on the desk. Akalya immediately pulled the second, blank gum wrapper from her skirt pocket and the girl wrote an address on it. As soon as she handed it back to Akalya, she stood and walked casually back to the shelves, stopping only for a moment to whisper in Akalya's ear that the man worked at the hospital on campus. She then continued back to the shelves and her task as if Akalya had never been there.

Akalya examined the address. The handwriting was the same as the one she had found on her table in 1965. She walked around the corner of a bookshelf and shifted the distance to El Porto, then back in time so that she could leave the note for herself. Once again, she felt as if she were living a Bill and Ted movie. She then returned to the library after shifting back to her natural time. The feeling of Gaye was strong there. She had to be nearby.

Akalya walked out of the library like any ordinary person. She hungered again, but it would have to wait. The trail she sensed was too strong to risk losing. It grew even stronger as she neared the hospital where Mason Andrews worked. Akalya wondered in what capacity. She assumed that her contact would have said if he was a doctor, but she wished she could have seen the entry herself. Mason might be an intern... or a cleaner. Either way he could have access to areas of the hospital that weren't open to the general public.

She entered through the front doors and walked straight to the elevators, looking for all the world like someone who had business there and knew where they were going. She pressed a button for the basement floor. Rumors about experiments in the hospital basement were traditional on campus, but Akalya felt the little hairs on the back of her neck rising as the evidence suggested that some of them might well have been true. She took deep breaths in an effort to control her natural claustrophobia.

As soon as the elevator doors opened, she was very alert and looked for any sign of trouble. The basement was shabby, far from the usual cleanliness standards that one expects in a hospital. The hallways were quiet though. Akalya walked as close to silently as her soft shoes would allow. She listened intently for any sound. At the end of the hall, she came to a door with a restricted area sign posted on it. There was no apparent security, so she walked through. Another hallway opened up before her, but there was no clue to guide her to any of the doors that lined both sides, apart from the sense of Gaye very nearby.

There were no choices left to her. She would have to follow the tag and shift into the space where she would find Gaye. She might well be shifting into a trap. She closed her eyes and focused on her awareness of Gaye. Suddenly she was next to her friend, who was strapped down to a hospital bed, but conscious.

Gaye tried to warn Akalya, but her mouth was covered with white first-aid tape. Akalya spun round quickly, taking in the situation. The other captives were in the room, also strapped to beds. They appeared to be asleep. Two men, both of them kidnappers that Akalya recognized from the beach portacabin, were running towards her.

Akalya's first instinct was to shift out, but she needed to know where she was so that she could bring help to rescue the captives. She ran for the door. The kidnappers might have been faster, but the door was close to her, so Akalya was able to fling it open and run through with the intention of shifting increments down the hallway so that she could move faster and still observe the route. However, instead she ran right into the arms of Marcus.

### Chapter Thirteen

The crucial moments in life can come down to a single moment of time. Everything that happens will be shaped by a single act, and which possible path is opened first. The end of my people could have resulted from the slightest mistake, but when there is no time to think, you can only follow your heart and what it tells you to do.

_Logic would have told me to escape quickly, before his touch could bind me in the way his future self had shown me. In that one moment of awakened passion on the roof, much of what the future might hold had been revealed. Marcus needn_ ' _t be my enemy. Perhaps it would take more than a moment in time to release whatever it was that made him work against his own people. Still I had to follow my heart and trust myself, just for a moment._

Akalya responded through pure instinct. Instead of struggling to get away, she pressed her body into Marcus' and kissed him deeply, distracting him from beginning the process of opening the possible windows of the shift as he had shown her on the rooftop. Instead, she shifted with him to a time just an hour before that encounter. The kiss came to a natural finish and Akalya released her hold on Marcus, stepping back a little. He looked around with a bewildered expression on his face. Akalya noticed for the first time just how handsome he was. She felt like she wanted to kiss him again.

"Where... when are we?" Marcus asked, his expression incredulous. It occurred to Akalya then that it had probably been his first time shift. The experience that she took for granted would have seemed very strange to him.

"Just a couple of years out of phase. I will take you back to your natural time, but I cannot do it if you block me as you have the others. Call it a time out... we need to talk."

Marcus hesitated a moment. He tried to keep his expressions neutral, but Akalya could tell that he was weighing up his options. In the end he could only capitulate, as he had no means to return to his own time stream without her co-operation. Akalya wondered if showing him how it felt would release whatever it was that blocked him from shifting himself. She fervently hoped that it wouldn't occur to him just yet, just in case.

"Okay, time out then. Why did you kiss me?"

"Because you kissed me first," Akalya responded with a smirk. "And I rather liked it."

She took a step forward and kissed him again, amazed at her own forwardness as much as she was enthralled by his physical closeness. His arms went around her and he returned the kiss with growing passion.

"Come," Akalya commanded. "We must discuss matters. Then we have a task to accomplish, so that the time/space continuum doesn't explode or something."

Akalya could see what form the discussion was likely to take if they had sufficient privacy. As appealing as the thought was that she could be alone with this man, more verbal communication was going to be essential if she was going to somehow lure him into co-operating with her to rescue the captives. Though her attraction to him was very real, she did not forget for a moment that her goal was to do just that and she would have slept with a man as a ruse if it would have accomplished their freedom. Mata Hari would have understood.

She led him to a Chinese restaurant a few minutes walk away on Wilshire Boulevard. Good old 90210, those few minutes took them into Beverly Hills. The restaurant was a little expensive, but still good value. She ordered a Kung Pao dish that had a combination of shrimp, chicken and beef in a peanut sauce with some fried rice. She hadn't forgotten that she was hungry again. Marcus ordered a sweet scallop dish in a sticky sauce with noodles. Akalya wondered if he was aware of the effects of scallops on a man's passions.

At first the conversation between them was guarded. Akalya answered honestly when Marcus asked her how she knew he could not shift. The story of what she had done to Tate almost made him spit a mouthful of noodles as laughter overtook him, imagining the pampered billionaire panicking as he fell through the air naked, and then his embarrassment when she left him alone on a New York street, completely vulnerable, for what must have been the longest moment of his life. Akalya tried to get Marcus to talk about his life, but she was only able to get brief snippets before he inevitably turned the conversation back to her and his own attempts at fishing for information about the network among her people.

She wished then that she knew more of biology and could speculate on differences in physiology and brain chemicals to explain why he was different. He had obviously been isolated from his father's people. From what Akalya could glean from the partial bits of information that seeped through Marcus' defenses, his father had passed through his mother's life briefly, leaving her pregnant. He wasn't even sure if his father had known of the pregnancy. Marcus had been left to discover his partial gift for himself with no one to guide him.

"How did you wind up working for Tate?" Akalya asked directly.

"That's where it all gets convoluted," Marcus began explaining. "Because of the visions I had about different times and places, I volunteered for a research project at UCLA. It mostly focused on psychic ability, and I could read the shapes on cards over the researcher's shoulder by opening a window to what for you would be a distance shift. I didn't understand the ability then."

Marcus took a few more bites of food before continuing. Akalya remained silent, her attention rapt.

"One day Mason appeared in the lab and was asking questions of all the volunteers. We were to explain what we saw or felt... any sense that related in some way to our ability to score well on the tests. The group had been narrowed down to the best performers at that stage." Marcus had a wistful expression on his face as he spoke, but Akalya noted increasing consternation as he related the next part of the story.

"Mason stepped outside of the room after he spoke to me, presumably to make a phone call. The others were dismissed as usual at the end of the session, but I was asked to wait. A few minutes later a woman arrived... Julia. She offered me a job, working for Tate. She didn't explain the nature of the work very clearly, but she started talking to me about people who could do what I could do, only they could actually travel through their visions to other times and places. She told me that they had identified some of these people and that they wanted to try some experiments to learn how to tap into their ability. I was the closest link to that gift that they had yet encountered."

Akalya nodded, but did not interrupt him. She had begun to feel genuine sympathy for Marcus and the obvious frustration that he must have lived through with no one to guide him through the discovery of his uncommon ability.

"I met with Tate once," Marcus continued. "He flew to L.A., wined and dined me like a celebrity and offered me bonuses if I could discover details about how to shift through time and space. He was already paying me a good salary just to be part of the operation. The money was a good incentive, but what I really did it for was the knowledge. I needed to learn about myself and whether I could do what they did... with some training."

"Perhaps you could learn from us directly," Akalya interjected. Marcus took both of her hands in his, the food forgotten, and looked into her eyes with an expression that pleaded for understanding.

"Can you help me to do that? I don't see how any of your people will trust me after all that I've done."

"You haven't actually hurt anybody," she reassured him. "Once the captives are freed, they might avoid you in ways you can never follow, but I'll stay with you. I'll help you to learn... if it can be learned. We can do our own experiments without any need for outsiders... Memlekel, to get involved."

"I haven't hurt anyone, but they may be hurt because of me." Marcus looked miserable as he confessed the full situation. "I didn't know when I met Tate that he didn't know about Mason. Mason is a researcher. Julia was always at Tate's elbow and steered the conversation away whenever I came close to mentioning anything about him. Tate is financing the operation. He's a slimy bastard but he isn't a killer. Mason intends to dissect people. He wants to study brain tissue."

Akalya dropped her smile. Had she been constricted by time, she might have flown into a panic to get to the captives before it was too late. As it was, she was only constrained to what had occurred... or not... in her natural timeline.

"When?" she asked with a serious tone in her voice.

"Tomorrow," Marcus replied without hesitation. "Or what would be tomorrow if we were still..."

Akalya could not help being amused by his loss for words to explain time differential. She supposed that it would take him some time to get used to, if he was able to learn to shift eventually.

"Come," Akalya said calmly. "I need to order some take out food and I'll need your help to deliver it, then we'll free them and shut down this house of horrors before it goes any further."

Akalya ordered the sweet and sour chicken and fried rice, including cookies, that would be delivered to her other self on an El Porto Beach rooftop. She found it easy to convince Marcus that he should deliver the Chinese food to her alternate self to prevent meeting herself and upsetting the balance of everything. She was bluffing about the science every step of the way, but when she was able to describe how he had shown her his ability to open windows that he could not follow through time, he was convinced of the Bill and Ted paradox and agreed that taking her the food would make perfect sense. She sent him up the stairs of the house on Shell Street, feeling envy for her other self who was about to experience the thrill of a first kiss.

Akalya took Marcus' hand as soon as he descended the stairs again and distance shifted both of them to the hospital basement hallway outside the room where her people would be held captive in her natural time. She noted that Marcus looked a little confused immediately after each shift and felt compassion for his predicament. She wondered how long it would take for an adult who had not grown up among Time Shifters to get used to the incorporeal sensation that accompanied every shift.

"This is going to be tricky," Akalya stated, trying to keep her deep concerns out of her voice. "We know how many men are going to be in there and where they are, but how do we free the captives without being overpowered?"

Marcus appeared to think for a few minutes, then a conspiratorial smile spread across his face.

"This is going to sound complicated, but if you can place me about five minutes before you crash into me at the door, I can walk into the room and remove the hold I have on them. Then if you jump forward to a few minutes after, presumably those men will chase you down the hall and you can shift into the room to free their physical restraints."

Akalya looked pensive as she considered the simple plan.

"There's one snag," she explained. "I can't shift time and distance at the same time." Akalya clasped her hands together and rested her forefingers on her lips as she thought through a series of possible plans.

"There's an easier way," she said at last. "We place ourselves inside now and I'll shift us together to five minutes after they chase me, assuming they do. You start from the far end of the room and I'll start from this end, then we link everybody and shift out. That way I don't have to go looking for you through time to bring you back to the present."

Marcus nodded approval.

"This basement is obviously deserted right now. Can you shift everyone at once and bring them to now?"

"No problem," Akalya replied with a smirk. "The only hard part will be getting them to touch hands when they're asleep. I presume they're sedated?"

"Yes," Marcus confirmed as he nodded. "But they're due another injection in twenty minutes, so they should be possible to wake at least a little."

"Let's do it then," Akalya enjoined, then she took Marcus' hand and led him into the deserted hospital room.

"Ready?" she asked. Marcus nodded his head and braced himself. Akalya wrapped her arms around him and began the shift, sinking into the alternate consciousness that would take her through time to a few moments beyond her natural time stream.

They heard the footfalls at once. One of the men had chased down the hall, presuming that Akalya ran just a little ahead of him. The other, however, had stopped at the door and turned. He saw the intruders apparate and started to walk towards them, addressing Marcus.

"How did you..."

His words were cut short as Marcus punched him directly in the face. The man crumpled.

"I think he assumed that I'd captured you. Let's move quickly."

Marcus and Akalya released the captives as planned. Gaye helped to gather them together as soon as she was freed. She didn't know why Marcus was helping when she had known him as an enemy, but it was obvious that Akalya knew what she was doing and that they were preparing to shift out. She didn't need to explain that she had been left unsedated as bait to lure Akalya into a trap. The trap, however, had backfired on the captors.

The three of them had to bodily move some of the somnolent Harekaiian to gather them close together on one of the beds. Most were waking drowsily to the disruption, but two of the smaller women were still fast asleep, having been given doses of sedative that their smaller bodies could not process as quickly as the larger men. At last everyone was close enough together that Gaye, Marcus and Akalya could touch everyone enough to make a connection. Akalya made the shift, taking the hospital bed along so that they wouldn't all collapse onto an unforgiving floor.

They were free.

###  Epilogue

Once everyone had been awakened and shifted out to wherever they chose, I took Marcus to the street outside his safe house in Santa Monica and shifted us both back to our natural time. I had his real address and promised to meet him there in an hour, then I shifted to 1971. It was an odd year, and one that no one would associate with anything of importance. Even with an intimate knowledge of my movements throughout my life, it was a short era that could easily be overlooked.

_Though it had changed entirely since then, Hawthorne Boulevard in Lawndale had an old familiarity to it, in particular a nondescript motel near 156_ th _Street that had weekly rates. It was only a short bus ride to the Hollywood Park horse racing track where I could sustain my cash with small bets and short shifts to ascertain the outcome, and that was very near to the Forum, where some of the best rock concerts in history had been played that year._

I decided to settle in for a few weeks. As long as I didn't allow myself to get overly tired, I wouldn't have to worry about shifting back to my own time in my sleep. I needed the rest. First stop would be the racetrack to pick up some local cash, then the Forum ticket office before I went back to rent a room. Led Zeppelin would be playing in August and if I bought the tickets in advance and shifted to the appropriate date for the evening, The Who was scheduled for December. Perhaps a concert each week would help me to forget that people like Tate and Mason were still looking for ways to surf the time streams.

For now, I could relax, knowing that they wouldn't be born for at least another ten years.

As for Marcus, thoughts of him only left me feeling confused. I planned to return to a time soon after we parted company. To him, it would seem that I had been gone only an hour or so. I would have to decide before then where I wanted our new alliance to go.

Passion confuses the senses. But time can heal a lot of pain. For the moment at least, the future was in my hands.

If you enjoyed this book, please write a review on your retailer's site to share with other readers what you liked about it! Reviews help readers make decisions about the books that will suit them best, and even just a few words can be invaluable feedback to both author and reader.

### The Author

Shanna Lauffey is a native Californian currently living in Europe. She spends her time between homes in Sweden, France and the UK. She writes Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance in her spare time between attending university and travelling.

Her first novel, She-Wȕlf, was released 1st January 2012, followed by Enigma, both of which are scheduled for re-release in 2014. The Time Shifters series is expected to continue for a total of ten episodes, which have drawn interest for a television series.

## The Chronicles of the Harekaiian

### Continue the series with Episode Two!

## Children of the Morning

The Time Shifters are in danger. Someone wants what they have and are willing to kill if necessary to get it.

Akalya couldn't hide in the past forever. The time has come to untangle the threads of a conspiracy so sinister that her very life hangs in the balance, as well as the lives of all of her kind.

Compelled by her promise to help Marcus, the half-breed, to learn to control his abilities, Akalya is conflicted by the need to go underground to elude the rich entrepreneur who continues to seek out others of her kind that even Akalya doesn't know about, and the mysterious researcher working behind the scenes who already came too close to dissecting her best friend.

Akalya cannot leave, but she cannot stay. Most of all she must see that no more of her kind breed mutants like Marcus, who could become a danger to them all.

### A Preview

Akalya knew that she couldn't risk sleep while they traveled in 1969. Distorted perceptions, however, could potentially become a problem. Knowing that Breeze had consumed significantly more of the 7up cocktail than she had herself worried her. People could drive on all sorts of intoxicants... for a while. She would have to stay alert to traffic as if she were driving herself.

Just as that thought crossed her mind, a large truck swerved into the lane just in front of them, leaving too little space between vehicles to slow down and avoid crashing into it. Without thinking, Akalya spread her consciousness over the van, tagging the three occupants besides herself, and distance shifted them to the far left lane and a little ahead, which was completely open. One moment they were about to crash, then the next they were past the offending truck and sailing freely down the road, out of danger.

"Wooooow, maaaan!" Jim said in a stoner's drawl. "That was some piece of driving. I never even saw you move the wheel."

Breeze shook his head, looking slightly confused.

"Neither did I, maaan. I thought we were goners when that truck cut us off. It must' a been reflex."

Akalya noticed his eyes flick towards Gaye, still sleeping in the back.

"Weird shit like that has been happening since I got with my ol' lady, but it can't be her witchy powers. She's dead asleep."

### See the Shanna Lauffey Blog for special offers!

<http://shannalauffey.weebly.com/>

