This wasn’t the lab. This wasn’t even close to where she intended to jump, and she’d have to analyze what went wrong in a minute. But the sight of the tourist galleon leaving port at sunset was still a pretty awesome view from the edge of the deserted beach parking lot. Might as well enjoy it. Ainan sat down on one of the bollards that surrounded the lot, and dropped her pack on top of her gun, by her feet.

Just as she was starting to really vibe with the sounds of nature at twilight, a car pulled up and parked in the space next to her in the lot. She turned and glanced at the car, noted that it was a lone man and he was pulling out a six pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, then turned back to the ship heading out to sea.

“Pretty neat sight, huh?” He sat on the next bollard and offered her a bottle.

She took it. “Yeah. I’ve never been here before. I know it’s touristy, but I like it anyway.” She opened the bottle and took a long first gulp. It’d been a while.

He pulled out his iPhone and got ready to take a picture. She glanced sideways at the home screen to try to get an idea of the date. It was too small to read. But at least she knew she was in the early 2020s now from the model of the phone. She’d had a similar one when she was younger.

“Hey, you wanna be in my picture tonight? I take a new picture every night around this time — for reference. I’m a photographer, but I’m a better painter.”

“I’m a scientist.” She took another sip. “And an engineer.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool. Whaddya working on?”

“Top secret stuff. So no picture.”

“That makes sense around here. And makes your backpack make more sense, too. That’s quite a contraption you got there. The beach part of your current project?”

“It wouldn’t be top secret if I told you all about it, now would it.”

He chuckled. “Nope, probably not. Looks cool though.” He took a few pictures while she sipped. “You sure you don’t want to be in one, just as a silhouette?”

“I’m flattered – but no. Thanks.”

Ainan gulped the end of the lemonade. Leaning over, she placed the bottle on the edge of the pavement next to her bollard. Then, she lifted the edge of her pack, and grabbed her gun, which he would not recognize as a real gun. She turned and shot him point blank in the chest.

He hardly had time to look stunned, as his body and iPhone slammed backward onto the pavement. The gun’s report was nearly inaudible.

“Sorry dude, but you already saw too much. Hope you weren’t important in this flow.” She stomped his phone hard, until it broke — then grabbed his hand, and began pulling him back toward the sand. “But if you were,” she groaned, “don’t worry, you exist in many others, in which everything turns out ok,” she sucked in a breath, “probably, because you never meet me, at sunset–” she grunted, “on the beach.” It took a few more minutes for her to get his whole body through the bollards and back onto the sand.

She was winded. She grabbed another lemonade and took a drink, then set it down next to her bollard and her empty.

She posed his dead body — back against his bollard, sitting with his head propped on his left hand, left elbow propped on left knee, leg held in place by the sand. She placed what was left of his lemonade — which he’d set down on the pavement and which was miraculously missed by his feet and leg as he fell — inside his other hand, standing in the sand.

She walked to the tide to clean herself up. She also rinsed the couple of spots from her outer shirt. She turned and walked back, drying her face, neck, and arms with her shirt as she walked.

She sat down next to him in the sand, and picked up her own drink.

The blood on the pavement behind them would be mostly concealed from the road by his car, but she’d have to move along pretty soon. She’d learned to savor moments like these, though, so she’d stick around for at least ten minutes yet.

The galleon sailed on, silhouetted and dark on one side, and golden on the other. A light breeze stirred the tiny patch of weeds next to her, and brought the smell of the ocean with it.

She pulled her pack onto her lap, and began to examine the workings of the time capsule, looking for some obvious programming error or hardware issue that might have caused her to be pulled into the wrong time flow.

She didn’t find anything revealing right away, so she decided to do a hard restart and try again, and see if it worked. If it did, she’d be at the lab, which was a better place to investigate jumping errors, anyway.

Unlike her former pursuer, hopefully she’d arrive in the same condition in which she left.

She stood up and put her pack on, turning to her photographer friend, and saluted. “Welcome to the Isle of the Forgotten in the River of Time.” She paused, taking one last look over her shoulder at the disappearing sliver of sun, and the darkened ship. “I’ve been there, you know. Can’t say I liked it. But it’s probably more enjoyable if you’re dead.”

“Where are you now, when I need you?” he cried.

“Well, I’m not there, am I?” she responded. “You’ll have to figure this one out for yourself, Doctor Tucker.”

He only had a minute or two left to figure out what buttons to push on the dimly-lit console in front of him. The labels made no sense; the symbols seemed foreign. But for some reason, he knew that this was his language, his script. I’m way too old for this!

Time to pick one. He pressed the one at the top center of the console.

The ship shuddered and came to a stop.

Oh, crap!

Frantically he began punching the others in turn.

A metal-bending, scrapey noise happened.

That didn’t sound good.

Things, everything – melted in front of his eyes into a soup of madness. From bad to worse. It never fails when she’s involved!

He flipped backward into the gravity-less compartment and yelled at the disembodied voice. “This is your — fault!” his voice cracked, shifting from aged to adolescent in mere seconds. Horrified, he watched as the rest of his blurry body followed suit, shrinking fast.

“How is it my fault?” she asked. “And if it was my fault, how would you even know? You don’t even know who I am anymore.”

“I’m SHRINKING! OF COURSE it’s your fault! What is even happening here?”

“You’re about to find out,” she answered a little too smugly.

Glaring up at the ceiling as if she could see his crinkled little nose, he balled his fists. His vision began to clear. He looked down.

Yep, that WAS what happened.

“We need a god who bleeds now,” she said.

“What? What does that even mean?” He still floated, with his fists balled. He glared again at the ceiling of the ship. He could no longer reach the controls. What was he trying to do, again?

I suppose this could be a useful ship’s feature, if…

“…If what?” He could feel her smiling at his realization. “…If one wanted to live forever.”

“And you were mad at me just a minute ago. You, who get to live forever, are mad at me, and I’m long gone.”

“…if one wanted to live forever — over and over again.”

The ship, and Tucker’s ears, jolted from a concussive impact. The asteroid field!

It had no patience with his process.

Come to think of it, neither would the Tjalians chasing him. It was all starting to come back, now…

What would they do with the boy they would find, if they caught him?

The ship jolted again. Tucker balled his now-tiny, newly-kidified fists and cursed his newly kidified size and brain. He needed a drink.

Where was his cup? He ran as fast as his short legs could now carry him, through the ship — which was also, thankfully, quite small. He dashed into his quarters and locked the auto-door behind him. This is it: The End!

There had to be a better way. A better way to bend time, to manipulate its billions of strands.

“You know I don’t approve of that line of thinking,” she said through her far-too-invasive feed in his head.

“Shut up! I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you!” he replied through the same feed.

“’Thank you’ is a more polite way of thanking someone,” she replied.

He huffed.

He’d no doubt be found in some Tjalian cell soon…as a tiny boy. He’d never survive in one of their prisons. If they even let him live that long.

Oh, how Tucker wished that a final goodbye could be spoken…but that time had not yet come. First, he had to fix the damages they had caused. He had to reopen the portals. Somehow.

There it was on the shelf above his bed: his cup. But more importantly, next to it, the tiny remote that would allow him to recall his ship. He put it in his mouth, and took a big swig to swallow it down. Hopefully, he’d be free enough to recover it when it reappeared… He scrambled to the end of his bed, crammed himself into one of the storage compartments, and shut the lid.

A Tjalian warrior broke through the door a minute later, and tossed the room looking for him. For a moment, Tucker thought he might be overlooked. The warrior communicated with his superior that he found no one in the room.

A second later, the lid of the compartment was opened.

***

Newly Young Again Tucker woke up in a Tjalian control pod, completely immobilized, as usual. The control pod could analyze his DNA, determining his actual age and identity…

He sighed. He didn’t know if they could return him to it, but if they could, he worried that he was actually so old that he would crumble to dust.

But maybe he wasn’t as old as he suspected he might be. Ugh. His memories were so…UGH!

He suddenly found himself with an intense craving for a banana split.

Or so his young mind told him. He wasn’t even sure what a banana split was. His mouth was cottony. Maybe it was a drink?

He could hear her mocking voice coming from the pit of his rumbly stomach as his breath began to condense on the pod window. “You don’t even remember banana splits? How could you forget our favorite shared dessert?”

“How could I forget my entire past? Let’s figure that out, and I’m sure the banana split question will be answered for you.” This life, or lack thereof, was all her fault; he was sure of it…though he wasn’t sure why he was sure of it.

“You were your own worst enemy. I merely saved you from yourself, gave you more time. If you work on this time problem long enough, I’m sure you’ll eventually figure it out.”

“I’ve worked on it for at least three decades that I vaguely remember. But, as usual, those memories all but faded away when I morphed.” He tried moving his fingertips. Nope. Nothing.

“The ingenious Dr. Tucker was renowned for his ability to figure out the impossible. If I just gave you the answers, you’d very possibly lose your whole identity completely, Banana Split Brain. We can’t have you remade into a lesser version of yourself, now can we.”

His memories felt like he was looking at them from afar. Like a swirling and colorful conglomeration, being sucked in and spit out of a time flow as he watched. “Sometimes I really hate you, you know.”

“Yes, I do. That’s what got you into this mess.”

His stomach gurgling nearly drowned her out. “What?”

He was sweating now. An intolerable itchiness followed where trickles of sweat started down his face. He had to get out of here…fast. His body was morphing again, speeding up his journey to adulthood. Visions of icy drinks started to replace his conscious thoughts.

“Hey, Banana Split Milkshake Boy. You’d probably better return to the problem at hand.”

Tucker couldn’t even move his eyes to roll them at her. But, finally — his pinkie finger twitched.​

Ainan hiked up the steep foothill toward the shiny black building – the lab Jonas built about 25 years after she jumped into the first time stream portal they’d found. She stopped to catch her breath for a moment and admire it. It seemed out of place in this lonesome setting, next to a river in the Wyoming wasteland, but it was a thing of beauty as it reflected the very last rays of the setting sun.

Jonas’s security measures were legendary. She knew they would be; she taught him just about everything he knew. At least to start. The man was brilliant. And because of that, she had to find a way to get him off of her tail, preferably permanently, or he’d wreck her plan to make her future what she’d always dreamed it could be.

She’d risked capture, disfiguration, and death to explore multiple time streams to investigate her options to get into the new lab, until she determined that this time was her best bet, with her current level of knowledge and skill. After this year, Jonas would install new tech that made the lab more impenetrable than Fort Knox or Cheyenne Mountain.

Ainan needed to steal his entire personal hard drive somehow — or at least an upgraded time capsule pack and anything that might be related to the “skin map” tech — as far into the future from her origin as she could, so she could use it to more safely elude him and his teams of the past, make some counter-tech, and disappear from his reach forever.

Returning her gaze to the quickly dimming path ahead of her, she set down her pack and pulled out her tablet. The wide main path ended just ahead of where she stood, diverging into three narrower paved paths. Each of the three diverged into more, and so on, up the hill to the lab half a mile away. If she didn’t take the correct path, the strong temporal forces Jonas had somehow harnessed to booby-trap this area would wreak havoc with her body on a cellular level, resulting in nausea and a loss of control of her extremities. She found that out the hard way a couple jumps ago.

She made a special trip to early in the following year so she could tag an employee with a tiny camera while they were in line together at a coffee shop in town. Then she sat back, drank her coffee, and recorded the safe way up. The camera feed was disabled upon entry, though.

While she was in that time, she camped out in a hotel in Cheyenne for several weeks to put the finishing touches on a device that could record and holographically mimic the unique biosigns of another human being for at least a full minute. She would have tried for longer, but she was hoping she could get what she needed without having to risk another series of jumps for a more suitable battery, and then risking Jonas waking up after she rufied him to record all of his biosigns for longer than a minute.

Squatting to pull out her water bottle, she breathed in the sharp, cool air and the scent of the mulched landscaping that ended here, and blew out a breath. She took a drink as she looked at her map and re-familiarized herself with the correct route.

I’ve earned this retirement. My whole life, people underestimated me, thought I was insane. I’m done with them. I did what I was created to do, made my mark, and now I’m gonna get my payoff!

“Why couldn’t you just let me go, Jonas?” she whispered toward the lab.

She placed her bottle back in the side pocket of her time capsule pack and pulled her hood up. Swinging her pack up over one shoulder, she picked up her tablet again and started up the left-most trail.

***

Getting into the lab had been difficult. Despite having Jonas’s biosigns recorded, she’d still had to hack her way through an extra layer of security protocols to open doors into this inner sanctum, using a regular peon’s terminal on another floor.

It seemed too easy, actually.

She felt the seconds ticking away like whole minutes, knowing that she had to have triggered an invisible alarm system at some point.

Now she stood staring into a dark room full of sleeping monitors, blinking robotics, and who knew what else — the future of time travel. She wandered across the room, scanning back and forth with the light from her tablet, looking for Jonas’s office, desk, table…whatever he had.

There. In front of the floor-to-ceiling window at the far end. That huge desk had to be it. Jonas never loved working in the basement. He loved natural light. She trotted the rest of the way across the room, carefully sidestepping and ducking through cords, robotic arms, and a maze of tables and computer workstations. She sat down at his desk.

Yep, this was it. He’d left a box with a picked-over assortment of donuts behind. They both loved glazed donuts when they were working on a particularly difficult solution, but her favorite donut was a filled chocolate bismarck. She hadn’t had one in forever…and she was in luck! She took a large bite out of the last bismarck in the box and wiped the bit of left-behind frosting from her lip with a finger. Heaven!

She rifled his desk drawers with her other hand until she found what appeared to be a portable drive. Would it be big enough? It was all she could find quickly, so she woke up his terminal, put on his newer version of her virtual-time-reality headset, turned on her biosigns imitator for the initial scan sequence, and went to work. She knew the bioscans would be random following the initial scan, and there was no way to predict when she would inevitably set off the alarm.

She couldn’t believe he wasn’t here already.

Ten minutes passed in a blaze. Her adrenal glands were in overdrive. As she tapped the final popup screen to download a copy of his entire hard drive, she turned on the biosigns imitator again to give confirmation and popped the very last morsel of the donut in her mouth. The machine began to hum faintly. She took a drink from her water bottle and stuck it back in her pack.

Thankfully, his terminal was lightning-fast, and that enormous number of terabytes flew onto the portable drive with space left over, in less than a minute. She could use the device she’d brought from the future to try to create a backup, but she wasn’t sure it was worth the time, since it might not be time-safe (was anything, truly?), and it might not even interface with the older operating system.

No time to think about it. She restarted the process, linked the device with few issues, and made a second copy. She tossed both drives into her pack. Fumbling back toward the main door while scanning the work stations, she found what appeared to be a nanite sample, and swiped the tube. She was so excited about the potential of the nanites that when she finally looked up, she was halfway down a hall she didn’t remember seeing when she entered the main lab.

The lights in the main lab flicked on. “We know you’re here, Ainan! There’s no way out!” Jonas’s voice echoed in the main lab room. “Just come talk to me! Why are you running? Why are you doing this? Just come talk!”

She ran tiptoeing down the rest of the hall toward a doorway that stood cracked open at the end.

She couldn’t believe her luck. These were definitely upgraded time capsule packs — not much different on the outside from the one she had! She grabbed one from the cubbies on the wall. If this is a capsule storage room, then… She scanned the rest of the room with her tablet light. Yes! Another door. It was locked, of course. She turned on the biosign imitator and used it to enter the next room. She closed the door behind her and heard the multi-lock engage.

Turning, she stopped, stunned. No way.

FOUR time streams were visible as she peered around the enormous, round chamber through the upgraded VTR headset. A convergence! How could four exist so close together, and why wasn’t she or anyone else affected by the inevitable space-time-shredding forces that had to be filling this room?

She pressed the power button. “Training mode!” she voiced quietly into the mic. The pack lit up, showing her which button to press for the initial setting.

Jonas, my friend, you’ve really outdone yourself. And, in this case, un-done yourself.

Ainan had the capsule figured out and programmed for her destination in under a minute. She heard the door to the capsule storage room close, and footsteps clattering closer. The multi-lock disengaged. She took off her old pack, threw the new pack on her back, and ran for the nearest time stream, to her left.

“Ainan!” Jonas yelled, reaching for her and missing as he came through the door with two men behind him. “Don’t do it! You don’t know–“

She jumped, and the stream pulled her in and away. She giggled as she zipped down the glittering tunnel of time. This was a fast one!

Ainan found herself in a tangle of time streams, being pulled from one to the next.

She had no idea how this would affect her destination, but she was fairly certain that meant Jonas had no idea, either.

She was a little worried that this jump might wreck her body like it had wrecked her first pursuer’s. Was this why that happened?

Well, she’d really had no choice. It was either jump or be captured by Jonas and his goonies. Might as well enjoy the ride.

And a ride it was, like riding rushing rapids in a kayak instead of being pulled smoothly down a stream on a pontoon boat.

There. To the left. You really couldn’t “swim” in a time stream, but Ainan leaned with every shred of mental power she had toward the first opening she saw.

She arrived on the bank of a very warm lime green river under a deep purple and red sky. She choked and coughed from the methane bubbling up from what looked like huge primordial pools all around her, then started breathing only through her mouth. She could still taste it. So pungent! Her lungs burned a little. Gravity also felt like it had increased, but maybe that was just the heat and humidity.

It was insanely quiet; only the occasional bubble popping disturbed the silence. She felt like she could hear the drops of sweat running down her face.

Have I jumped to the dawn of time?

She looked down and patted her body, then tested every muscle group in turn. She seemed to be ok on the outside — no weird mutations. No pains on the inside, either. Despite the humidity and the methane, she felt she could breathe for the moment.

She pulled off the new time capsule pack, which was still in training mode. As she’d suspected, Jonas had figured out how to calculate the approximate arrival date. The pack displayed it on the handy touchscreen.

She’d jumped farther into the future than she’d ever been before. What was the margin of error on this thing? Hm!

Is this Earth?

She looked to the sky for stars, but found none. In the Jonas-suggestion-box in her mind, she added the need for a visitor information file. She sat on a knee-high black rock nearby, pulling the pack onto her lap to finish going through the training mode steps she’d skipped in her haste to jump. The first thing she needed to find out was how to shut off the homing signal before Jonas could send someone after her, but she’d be ok if the device taught her how to figure out her location too.

Aha. She found it. A geolocator function! Unfortunately, hers seemed to be broken. It was not displaying coordinates. Was she…?

Small ripples broke into a tiny succession of waves in the pool next to her. A three-inch-long, crocodile-like creature with six legs crawled onto the slimy bank. She’d never seen its like — but if she was as far into the future as the pack said she was, maybe this was evolution. This could still be Earth…but where were the clouds, the stars?

She finished the training steps, turned off her signal, and set her pack to find another time stream. She did not want to jump back into the convergence until she’d had a chance to go through Jonas’s hard drive.

Following the directional prompts from her pack, she picked her way among the pools, still wishing for that visitor information file. Or maybe an atlas of time? She liked discovery, and the rush of adrenaline…but she did also want to stay alive to do it again.

There seemed to be a single knee-high rock next to each of the pools in this odd place. Nothing else. Why the pattern?

No trees. No mountains in view. Just a vast expanse of pools of varying sizes and slime levels, each with a single rock. The rocks were not all the same color. Now that Ainan was used to the green river and the striking sky colors, the stones were the standout decoration in the blah mustard-brown dressing of the rest of the landscape.

She squatted down next to one, inspecting it with her hands and eyes, seeing if the shape, composition, and texture would speak any enlightenment to her. Some kind of granite maybe?

She stood up just in time to see a large ripple pushing toward her in the pool. She was paralyzed for a millisecond — then she ran.

The thermostat wire.

It had only taken him an eternity to remember it. When pulled out, it would cause the pod to pop open as a precaution.

On the bright side, during all this think time, his body finished morphing to that of a young adult, and the drug that immobilized him helped to dull the pain for a while. Until he outgrew the dosage. The tradeoff was that he could now feel and control his appendages better.

The downside was that he was now much too tall for this pod, which immobilized his body in a new way: crunching it into configurations it was not meant to make.

He managed to get what he hoped was the thermostat wire hooked between the very end of his big toe and its buddy at an amazing rate of only one curse word per second (for God-only-knows how long). Then it slipped away. Working his toes and the top of his foot farther into that tight cutout, he tried again.

Several frustrating and excruciating minutes after that, he managed to partially dislodge the wire. The pod popped open.

His foot was bleeding, bruised, and stung like heck, but he was free of the control pod. He tried to take a breath, but gagged and coughed up some of the gel they had packed his body in. Then he managed to turn his head and lift one shoulder just enough to throw up to his side, in the gel.

Problem one: he knew he did not have the couple of minutes he needed to cough up the rest of this stuff and breathe uncontaminated air to finish clearing his system of the drug, so he could be coordinated and get the heck out of this place.

Problem two: completely naked, he would leave a trail of gel wherever he went until he dripped dry.

He flopped his body over the no-throw-up side of the pod, and onto the floor closest to the door. His feet hit first. Barely. Ow!

I can’t believe they haven’t redesigned these control pods yet!

A Tjalian guard showed up at the door and pressed a button with his top right hand. He shot a significant look at Tucker through the small window in the door.

Silent alarm, now, apparently.

The guard glowered at Tucker and indicated the wall with the boomstick he held in his top left hand.

Tucker sighed, crawled ahead, then finally stood up using the wall for support. He ‘assumed the position’ in momentary resignation.

The guard came in, gave the control pod a disgusted glance, then placed magnetic cuff shackles on Tucker’s ankles, neck, and wrists. He lifted Tucker by his shackles, as if Tucker’s six-foot-four 200-pound body weighed almost nothing, and carried him from the control pod bay to a prison bay.

At the first cell to their left, the guard paused and unlocked the feeding port.

Bad, bad sign.

He lifted Tucker’s body and pushed him down the slippery, smelly chute.

Tucker slid helter-skelter down the chute, popped out the end on his side, and flopped over on his face. As the chute retracted, the guard disengaged the cuff shackles’ magnetic attraction, leaving him still shackled, but able to move.

“He likes his food to put up a fight,” the guard’s robotic translator device laughed through the intercom.

Tucker lifted his head. Oh crap!

He rolled and dodged the giant Capastraunian’s first venomous tentacle swipe just in time. He kept rolling and got his legs and elbows under him, scrambling out of the way of another strike.

He scanned the cell, looking for the most defensible position, and in the same moment, ducked another swipe, tucked, and rolled. Hopping up immediately, he ducked the other tentacle, and ran behind the Capastraunian. He dropped to the floor as the Capastraunian turned. In the moment he had before the single bulging eye was able to track him again, he squeezed his (thankfully still slimy) body under the solid, giant quarter-round of cement-like material attached to the wall as a bed in the cell’s corner.

The rough material tore at his naked skin as he frantically pushed with his toes and pulled with his forearms, squeezing himself closer to the vertex. He shifted his body as far away from the opening as he could. The smell of rotten fish intensified the farther he squeezed into the enclosed space. He gagged.

They have to keep my mind occupied with survival. Which means they know I can get out of here.

The large, bulging appendage flattened itself and pressed against the opening under the cot. A long stinger sprung from the end of the tentacle. The Capastraunian swiped back and forth with the stinger, only inches from Tucker’s outer leg, as it continued to further flatten and extend its tentacle.

He had nothing with which to defend himself, except his cuffs. Could he re-activate them? Could he somehow activate or repel the cuff on the Capastraunian’s tentacle?

He sucked in a nauseating breath of decaying flesh, rotting vegetables, and feces — and squeezed back as the barb swiped past again, missing his flesh by mere millimeters.

Tucker had nothing with which to poke at the cuffs, currently, and therefore, nothing with which to re-activate or reprogram them. Debris and sludge of unthinkable origin littered the room. If he could just get to the pile of bones in the corner…

“DO YOU REALLY WANT TO EAT ME?” he yelled. “I CAN GET YOU OUT OF HERE!”

The Capastraunian flattened its tentacle further, preparing for another, closer swipe under its permanently mounted bunk.

He held his breath, awaiting the swipe, the jab, the paralyzing poison.

At least it would put an end to his endless respawning cycles. The multiverse was on its own now.

A clunking, tumbling sound echoed through the cell, closely followed by a second. The tentacle paused.

So did Tucker’s heart.

An apple bounced off of the tentacle and rolled in front of the bunk.

Another bounced off the nearby wall.

The attacking tentacle pulled out from under the bunk as the Capastraunian skewered the first apple with its other one, popping the apple into its soft beak. Slurping noises ensued as the gigantic, bipedal brute popsicled the comparatively miniscule apple, digesting it layer by layer. Crunch. It skewered the second one.

“Staying until he’s done with the appetizers?” the robotic voice reverberated impatiently.

Tucker shimmied out from under the bunk, pausing only a half-second as he exited to ensure his cellmate was not looking. He sprang up and beelined across the cell, splooshing through piles of organic detritus that made his bile rise and innards curl.

“Left, NOW!”

He dove left, under the food chute, just as a barbed tentacle swiped past him, detouring to skewer another lifesaving apple midair. Who would’ve known Capastraunians liked apples so much? Or maybe just this Capastraunian?

The hidden access hatch slid open in front of him, revealing a humanoid encased in an all-black mech suit with an opaque face shield.

A nightwalker! Out of the frying pan…he didn’t even hesitate. The door slammed closed behind him, nearly catching his heel.

The nightwalker pointed its left arm at his shackles, and they clanged to the floor from his neck, wrists, and ankles. “LET’S GO!” the robotic voice commanded. It turned and barreled toward the exit at the far end of the cell block, about 100 meters away. The prison noises almost drowned out the noise from the mech suit boots pounding the floor.

Tucker raced after it, his slick, gross bare feet slapping and sliding against the smooth, hard floor — every stride jarring and unreliable. And leaving an obvious trail.

Tjalian security codes used a to-date-unhackable level of encryption. To get through, you had to somehow locate and steal the single paired transmitter for each location, usually embedded in the body armor of a formidable shift commander.

The nightwalker arrived at the door to the cell block several seconds before him. It tapped a sequence on its left arm, and aimed it at the cell block door.

Commanders and codes were changed at random intervals. The transmitter the nightwalker had stolen might even now be unusable. His already thin breath got thinner.

The door opened just as he slid up. He felt a tentative hope — and became even more aware of his new ‘cologne’ and stark nakedness — as they escaped down the hall to the right. Most embarrassing escape ever…

Huffing uncontrollably, he was again outpaced by a mile. It must be nice to have a mech suit right now.

The nightwalker ducked to the left at the end of the short passage. When Tucker reached the turn, it grabbed his arm and yanked him over, tapping a button on its suit in the same instant.

Like water through a sieve, the current time and place dissolved, and a new one appeared.

White and misty, unformed, squishy, and odorless — this was a blank place, a void.

Well, almost blank. Tucker squinted at a familiar-looking fuzzy spot ahead, but he was pretty sure he’d never been here before.

The nightwalker pushed him through it, jumping in after him. As he was sucked into the maelstrom, his memory finally cleared. This was a time portal. Like the network of streams he’d discovered and used — all but destroyed through misuse eons ago. This was one of the remnants the Tjalians and others were seeking. He started to realize why the nightwalker might need him enough to risk its own life.

Oh Crap.

Tucker popped out of the time stream, landing on his feet on the bank of a very warm yellow river, right behind the Nightwalker. The neon hues of this place were blinding. He felt like he’d popped through the looking-glass. But at least the slime and stench had been washed off.

“Does this purple shirt make me stand out?” mewed a giant, one-eyed, humanoid cat-being, who was holding a book in one hand and gazing into a mirror he’d positioned under a nearby bright blue tree. A breeze rustled the violet and aqua leaves as the cat turned back and forth, assessing his look while striking poses. After a minute or so, he finally turned his gaze to his visitors. He startled. “MrRow!” He flicked a paw, giving them each a very uncomfortable amount of scrutiny with his immense green eye.

Tucker covered himself with his hands and tried not to act as embarrassed as he felt. He blinked and squinted at the cat-being. “Ummm, no? Not to me — but I’m not an expert in these things.”

“That’s why we don’t ask him for style advice,” the Nightwalker said. “That deep shade of purple is delicious. You will stand out quite nicely.”

The words seemed incompatible with the electronic voice output they were delivered in.

“Thank you,” said the cat-being, flicking his tail. He tossed his book under the tree. “Now, who are you and how did you get here? Good books have always transported me to extraordinary places…but a naked man and a shadow being popping into my territory out of nowhere is a whole new level!” Talon-like claws casually appeared at the end of his long fingers as he crossed his arms.

“Indeed,” said the Nightwalker. “We are only figments of your imagination. Pink plum juice people.”

The cat huffed and growled, “Nice try!” He sniffed the air, moving toward them. “I haven’t had any juice for a week! I’m clean! Let’s try again…”

Tucker stepped closer to the Nightwalker. “Where are we?” he whispered.

“So you don’t know where you are, young human? You smell awfully familiar to me,” the cat-being purred, suddenly appearing next to Tucker’s face. He rubbed cheeks and left a palpable cat scent behind. “I’m fairly certain you’re another iteration of my favorite human.”

The cat turned to the Nightwalker and closed the distance between them without seeming to move. “And you,” he sniffed and sneezed in her face, “you are my nemesis of old. But why are you here together? This is a confusing development.” His tail flicked as he turned and trained his eye on them.

“I broke him out of a Tjalian prison.”

“Why would you do such a selfless thing?” the cat-being placed a claw under the Nightwalker’s chin. “I have a hard time believing anything you say.” He looked at Tucker. “Is she telling the whole truth?”

Tucker found the scrutiny of the huge eye quite unnerving, especially when combined with those claws. “I-I don’t know why she did it, or even who she is. I didn’t even know she was a ‘she’ until you told me so just now. I’ve lost a lot of memories. But yes, she did just break me out of a Tjalian prison cell, and I was seconds from becoming a Capastraunian snack when she saved me.”

“Interrrrrresting,” the cat-being purred, putting a little more upward pressure on the claw under the Nightwalker’s chin. “The suspense builds. I do loooove a good plot.” He considered for a moment. “I suppose I will let you live, this time,” he growled at the Nightwalker, retracting his claw from her chin. “But only because you’re with Tucker.

“Carry on,” he stepped to the side and waved them toward a path through the neon blue trees, keeping his gaze firmly attached to the Nightwalker. “I assume you are headed to the portal to the south. I don’t want your scent to linger here if the Tjalians are on your tail. Plausible deniability, and all.”

“Say hello to your wife for me, Nero,” said the Nightwalker as she passed him.

“I would, but she recently passed away — car accident.” He examined his claws.

“I’m sorry to hear that! But…how did it happen? No one on your planet drives cars.”

“I tell people that because no one would believe the real story,” Nero said. “I killed her. She cheated on me with a Tjalian.”

“And people believe the car accident story?”

“Well, of course I say it happened while she was visiting another planet.”

“Well, I’m sorry for your loss, nonetheless.”

“We both know you are a twisted, selfish sociopath, much like myself, my dear. But I’ll take the polite sentiment, nonetheless. Tucker, put some clothes on.” He pulled off the new purple shirt and stuffed it down over Tucker’s head.

Now Tucker had a long purple dress.

“You wouldn’t happen to have your wings parked nearby, would you?” the Nightwalker asked.

“Yes, but I’m not flying you anywhere, regardless of who you’re with. Now get out of here.” He purred at Tucker. “Good luck. And watch your back. She likes to stab them.”

Ethan’s hand explored the rock face above him, grasping for his next handhold. He had to get to the top before they did.

It was definitely time to pray, if praying worked.

It was his powers they were after.

He pressed his body as close to the cold, hard rock as he could. Too bad his powers wouldn’t get him to the top of this cliff any faster. Flying would be a very useful power right about now — but he wouldn’t trade it for what he had.

His hand found a tiny crack, just big enough to jam his already-torn fingers in.

As he climbed, he took his mind off the pain with thoughts of the past. The past that he was now unsure existed. A “before” full of heartache — but thanks to his unique ability to find portals to other timelines, also full of second chances.

He could fix this. He had to be careful, and hopefully fast.

Once he was in a timeline, he had to live there somehow, until he found the portal. He never knew where it would be, but when he got closer, he could feel its pull. He had to find it soon, before they caught up with him.

Finally…he pulled himself and his small pack up and over the edge of the escarpment. Just ahead, there was a heavy stand of trees. A musty smell of damp earth filled his senses as he crawled away from the edge, breathing hard. He bent over, leaning on his own knees to catch his breath for a second. Then he ran, as fast as his bare feet would take him across the twiggy, rocky ground, glancing behind him frequently.

Inside the forest, it got a little better for his feet and harder for his eyes. There was a thick, grassy, mossy groundcover. He ran through the trees, zig-zagging into thicker stands, until he came to a gnarled old tree where slightly more light penetrated the heavy foliage above him. He looked at the ground behind him to see if he had left a trail. He didn’t see anything obvious. He looked up into the tree.

This might work. If his hands, feet, and arms could take more climbing. He flexed his fingers, then reached from his tiptoes, measuring.

He jumped, but his hands scraped only the bottom of the first branch, without catching hold. His whole body was sore, scraped, and almost useless already from free-climbing the escarpment. He jumped again. Missed. Come on!

Was that a distant voice? Maybe he needed a new plan.

One more jump.

Thank God, he caught hold. He pulled himself up — and then he felt it. The pull. But where was it coming from?

It would be awesome if he had some kind of magical amulet that would show him where these things were — but alas.

He scrambled to the next limb, and the next…following it. He had to disappear before they got here, one way or another.

He walked out some distance on a thicker branch while holding the one above him — it crossed over a similar branch in a nearby tree. Gauging the distance, he springboarded from his current limb, and made the small jump.

His forearms raked along the branch until his hands caught, his right foot slid out from under him on the branch below — but his left foot landed firmly. Too much noise!

He sucked in a breath and exhaled slowly, examining the tree before him. Then he quickly tightroped in along the knobby, sappy limb, using surrounding branches to help steady himself when he could.

He had a peculiar sense of déjà vu when he wrapped his arms around the trunk of the next tree. Looking to his left, he felt the pull again, but he couldn’t see it. How would he mark this location, so he could get back to it once he lost his pursuers? He looked back.

Too late. They were already at the base of the tree he’d originally climbed. Three men wearing strange-looking backpacks. They’d seen him arrive in this timeline yesterday, and immediately tried to shoot him.

“He’s got to be here,” one of them growled.

“How do you know that? He didn’t leave much of a trail to follow. We could be in the wrong place altogether. ”

“No, he’s here. He’s drawn to them, remember? There’s a flow just to the east,” he pointed directly below Ethan.

Ethan froze, hoping the foliage around him concealed him from their immediate view. How were they finding the portals? How did they even know about the portals? Were there others like him? What year was this?

The déjà vu overtook him again — this time enveloping his senses. He blinked, and he was in a long-term care facility.

Sunlight filtered through the dusty blinds and scattered its rays across his grandfather’s aged face. He met the eyes of the one person on earth he revered.

“Ethan,” Grandpa rasped.

Suddenly, Ethan was back on the branch of the tree, feeling lost, aimless, and confused. What just happened?

The men walked in his direction. Thankfully, they were searching the ground.

“Ethan,” Grandpa’s voice rasped again…or was it the branches in the breeze? The forest faded from his view, but not completely; the room of the care facility seemed to fade in and out over his immediate surroundings.

“Grandpa?” he whispered.

“When you see me, look to your left.”

“What?” Ethan asked, confused. He remembered this day — he remembered thinking his grandpa was finally losing the last of his exceptional intellect.

“When you see me, look to your left. It’s there. You’ve almost forgotten, but you’re not lost.”

Ethan was floored — Grandpa could see other timelines, speak across dimensions?

He watched his other self walk in and squeeze Grandpa’s hand.  “Hi, Grandpa! How are you feeling today?”

As the room began to fade from his view again, he looked to his left. He could feel it, like he was right on top of it — but he couldn’t see it this time. Did he trust his grandfather enough to jump from 20 or so feet up in this tree, hoping that he’d aim correctly and be swept up into the time stream?

The care facility returned, fully this time. Ethan could see the shadows from the drawn blinds dancing on the opposite wall of the room when he looked to his left.

And there — the stream beyond the swirling portal, flowing away into the shadows! He ran toward it, hoping this reality would last long enough for him to get there.

Nope! The care facility disappeared, and Ethan dropped like a miscalculating squirrel, snapping through evergreen twigs and needles. He bounced hard off a large branch to land even harder on another.

“There he is!” A man below him shouted, aiming a weapon at him.

An invisible blast of something cut through the tree, leaving a hole — but missed Ethan.

Ethan looked around frantically. He could see the stream now, out past the end of the branch he’d landed on! His ribs and his right arm throbbed sharply. Probably broken.

But he had to get there, and fast. If they caught him…

Another blast zinged past him.