City of Ruins (4 page)

“Don’t know,” I tell him. In English.

Yes, Mermaid, you do.

Who said that? Mother?

I wonder if this means the lingo-spot voices
are back. I don’t care. I have the astrolabe that Mother designed.
The only part of her that’s left to me. I will hold it close while
I take my nap and try to dream of Alexandria.

Chapter Three

Eli: Days of Future
Passed

February 2020 C.E.

I’ve been in this room before.

It’s not often I get to say that. Most people
seem to spend a lot of their lives in familiar rooms. Not me, not
anymore. I’m lucky if I can even stay in a century I recognize for
more than a little while.

But now I’m back in room number 532, from the
Fairmont Hotel. Mom’s old room, when she lived in San Francisco,
back in World War II. But the room isn’t in the Fairmont anymore.
And neither am I. I’m still in the old BART tunnels that the
Defense Advance Research Projects Agency has been using as a kind
of headquarters.

And a kind of jail.

This is supposed to be the “secure” area —
that’s what they said, after they ended my DNA mapping early and
unhooked me. “We’re taking you to the secure area.”

“Because of the alarms?” I asked. It was one
of the Twenty-Fives, one of Thirty’s assistants, who was taking me.
“Does this mean it’s not a drill? That the slow pox has really
gotten in?”

“No time for questions.”

The pox appears to have spread a lot while
I’ve been gone. After we all escaped from New Orleans in the 1800s,
by time-porting through the Fifth Dimension with my Seals cap, we
wound up…almost home.

Almost
back at my dad’s lab, in the
Valley of the Moon, north of here. But not quite.

We “landed,” or appeared, under the Golden
Gate Bridge, near Fort Point. The same place I last saw my mom, who
had been working on a secret time-travel project during World War
II—or at least pretending to work on it while trying to keep it
from being turned into some kind of weapon.

The world already has way more than enough
weapons, anyway. Letting governments invent more —especially
time-travel weapons — might tip things over the edge, especially
since we were discovering that time travel was changing history in
ways we couldn’t always see. For instance, the first real
breakthrough in time travel was supposed to come in 2019, in my
parents’ lab. But after a few time trips, the flow of history had
changed enough that it was suddenly being researched in secret,
during the second world war, just like the atomic bomb.

And just like the atomic bomb, its effects
were widespread, and unpredictable.

I wasn’t thinking of any of this when we
landed back on that tiny beach, a few…what? Days ago? Or has it
been weeks, already?

But there we all were—cold, scared, hungry,
tired—huddled on the beach with the wind from the Pacific howling
under the bridge, and me throwing up.

Time travel seems to be agreeing with me less
and less.

“Behold! The end of history begins!”

Somebody was shouting, but my head felt too
heavy to turn around and see who it was. And by the time I could
lift it —

“Eli,” Thea said.

— we were already surrounded by men with
guns. And uniforms. DARPA. Army. The same people who’d surrounded
my dad’s lab at the Moonglow winery, up in Sonoma.

And Mr. Howe, who helped run things for DARPA
— or at least
did
, until he became accidentally unstuck in
time, too — was yelling at his old troops. Yelling at them, and not
at me. For a change.

“No! No! You don’t understand! You
do
not
understand!” After his experience meeting one of his own
relatives in the era of Thomas Jefferson, and ping-ponging back
through the Fifth Dimension, it was hard to tell if he was still
“in his right mind,” as the grownups like to say.

Not that his “right mind” was all that right
before.

Some of the guns were aimed at him —

“Behold! Their swords are still not beaten
into plowshares!”

That voice again. I
knew
it. But how
could it be —?

A.J. Andrew Jackson Williams, the Army
preacher from World War II, and motel owner from that cross-country
drive I took with my dad. And a guy who seems to be getting knocked
around history almost as much as I am.

How could he be
here
? They told me he
died in 1969.

Then the screaming started. Farther down the
beach, there were people who were standing in the tide, their
clothes soaking wet. They were pointing at us. And at Clyne, with
his glistening-but-bumpy green-blue lizard skin, his torn time-suit
with his tail sticking out, and his long mouth with all its very
sharp teeth, all of which became visible to them when a couple of
the soldiers shifted position. And when Clyne started to speak.

“Friend Eli, we seem to have time-skipped
from one mammal rumble to another.” There wasn’t even time to agree
with him when shots were fired in the air.

Ironically enough — and considering how long
it’s been since I’ve been in a classroom and had a spelling test or
done any kind of English or vocabulary studies, it’s pretty good I
know how to use a word like
ironically
— it was Mr. Howe who
managed to escape.

He ran into the crowd that was surging toward
us, stripping off his jacket and the damp, torn up tie he had on,
as he tried to blend in with the people on the beach. “Let him go!”
one of the soldiers’ leader yelled at the others.

They weren’t quite prepared to fire into a
crowd of people, but they didn’t want to let their guard down with
Clyne there, either. “We’ll get him later!”

Thea and I were quickly surrounded, and my
Seals cap — the one that lets me time-travel — was snatched away by
one of the soldiers, who handled it with gloved hands. Thea and I
were stuck again. More shots were fired into the air, to keep the
sopping wet people back where they were, and then the two of us
were put into one of the vans that were parked on some broken
pavement just above the beach area.

I couldn’t see what happened to Clyne, but he
wasn’t in the van with us.

How could all of those soldiers be waiting
there like that? How did they know where we’d wind up? Did A.J.
know? But then, it seemed like they were after him, or his group,
too.

The van started up, and while I wasn’t
exactly sure where they were taking us, I had a pretty good guess:
down to the DARPA tunnels, to answer questions. I’d had a van ride
like that before — after my dad and I had moved west from New
Jersey, to his family’s abandoned winery in the Valley of the Moon,
Dad was hoping he would left alone to do his research, to figure
out a way to bring my mom back from wherever she was lost in the
time stream.

It seems like such a long time ago—as though
I wasn’t just a year younger then, but way younger. Young enough to
think everything would always work out for the best and that the
good guys always win.

For that earlier drive, they had the windows
completely blacked out, and I couldn’t see where I was going.

This time, there was a place in the back
where the paint over the glass had started to peel away, and you
could peek out of it.

I was still shivering, and Thea found some
old blankets in the back, the kind they wrap heavy boxes in. They
were smelly, but she put one around me to keep me warm. Then she
looked out the peephole.

“All your citizens,” she said, peering out.
“where are they?”

We’d been driving awhile, and I think we were
somewhere downtown—Market Street, maybe, or Geary, ’cause of the
hills, heading down toward Union Square, and then down toward the
Bay, in the direction of the old Ferry building or the Giants’
ballpark…

I leaned over, pulled the blanket closer, and
looked, too. Thea was right, there was hardly anyone around.

“Maybe it’s Christmas,” I told her. “It
always seems to be Christmas when I’m in San Francisco.”

“The winter festival?” she asked. Then she
peered back out the window. “But shouldn’t there be more people out
on the boulevards if there’s a festival?”

“It’s usually the kind of festival people
celebrate in their homes.” Not me, of course, not anymore. Back
when I had two parents that lived with me in a single place — in a
single time — I even used to have two holidays. Not only Christmas
trees, but we lit candles for Chanukah, too. Another kind of winter
festival. It was something my mother’s family did when she was
growing up, and so did we.

There used to be a lot of lights in our
house, when December rolled around.

“Well, does that explain the absence of
vehicles, too?” Thea was looking at me, her eyes widening a little
bit, her curly dark hair still wet and clinging to her face.

Now that she was fourteen, she was managing
to look, I don’t know, not so much like a girl, anymore, but kind
of cute, even in situations where there was really no point in
looking cute.

Like in a DARPA van, where even having that
thought —about her potential cuteness— felt completely beside the
point, too. God, now that I’d turned thirteen, was I gonna have
corny ideas in my head like that all the time?

Then I thought about that quick kiss thing we
did in New Orleans.

“Are you okay?” she asked, leaning in to look
at me.

“I’m sorry I got you into all this,
Thea.”

“Into what?”

“This…” I waved my hands around the van and
pointed to the city outside. “All of this. Taking you away from
your home, from your mom, when she needed you. From your own
time.”

“That was not you, Friend Eli.”

Friend Eli! She was sounding like Clyne, even
without Clyne being around. Maybe we were all sounding more like
one another now. Maybe that’s ’cause we were the only family any of
us had left. Like three kids left in the house alone while our
parents ran off to the corner store for a moment.

Except that the parents never came back, and
the house was like all of history — we never knew which room we’d
be in next.

“That was not you.” She reached out and
touched my face with her fingers. “Tiberius would have taken my
mother from me, regardless. His mob would have burned Alexandria,
either way. And if you hadn’t come along, he would have taken me,
too. You saved my life.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just felt kind
of funny all over. We rode the rest of the way sitting next to each
other — not cuddling or anything like that — just being quiet,
looking out the tiny patch of window that was all we had to make
sense of the world.

It didn’t seem to be Christmas, or even
winter, as far as I could tell. It looked like summer. But of
course, weather no longer worked in predictable “seasons,” like it
did in the old days, so you could never be sure.

People weren’t off the streets because there
was a holiday, it turns out. They were all indoors because there’d
been a quarantine. For slow pox.

I found out during one of those debriefings
in the DARPA tunnels. There was no Comnet in the bare, bright room
they first took me to, and I had to pay attention to Thirty. But
this particular “debrief” was better than the others, because they
brought Thea with them. I think maybe they thought if they did
something like that, Thea and I would lighten up and start chatting
away, and we could all be friends

“You’ve been away for a few months and things
have gotten worse here,” Thirty said, thinking maybe she’d try her
version of “helpful.” “Problems with the weather, wars still
breaking out, someone somewhere always angry about something,
bombing someone else. And on top of everything else, there’s this
plague. Thank God it’s slow pox. If it spread any faster, I don’t
think we could manage.”

“Managing” consisted of keeping people
inside, mostly. So I guess, in that sense, being stuck in the DARPA
tunnels made Thea and I a lot like “normal” teenage kids in the
year 2020, who weren’t getting out much. Thirty said something
about the government letting people out to shop once in a while,
but mostly keeping them apart so they wouldn’t keep infecting each
other.

Even though I knew slow pox was bad, I didn’t
think it was that easy to catch. Maybe I was wrong.

“So what do you want from Eli and me?” Thea
asked her. A translator repeated the question to Thirty — who was
not expecting either of us to start asking
her
questions at
all.

“Well, that’s it, isn’t it, my little time
travelers? What do we do with you when all of history seems to be
unraveling at once?”

“Why do you have to do anything at all?” I
asked back. “Why not just let us go home?”

“And where
is
‘home,’ for the little
time travelers?” she wondered, with a hard little smile. Now it was
Thea’s turn to ask something.

“And what of our friend K’lion? Will you be
bringing him in here, soon, too?”

I always kind of liked the way she pronounced
Clyne’s name.

“Ah, Mr. Klein. Yes. You have to understand,
not everyone is as…
used
to his presence, as the two of you
appear to be.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She never answered. She didn’t seem to like
how this was going, and said, “We’ll show you to your rooms now.”
That was the last time I saw Thea.

After that, Thirty started taking me to the
cafeteria with her, or at least she’d meet me there, in another
attempt to be “friendly,” or maybe in a pitiful attempt to make up
for Thea’s absence.

One time the two Twenty-Fives came to bring
me to the cafeteria and I overheard them talking about Mr. Howe.
They said he’d gone “off the reservation,” and at first, I wondered
if they were talking about the Mandan village I’d been to with the
Corps of Discovery. But then when they said, “He’s out there saying
crazy things,” I figured it meant he was doing some stuff they
didn’t officially approve of.