Time Salvager (30 page)
When the long day was over, everyone marched in twos back down the buildings. Elise’s initial fears about ascending and descending in darkness now came true, since the setting sun no longer offered enough light to illuminate the doorways. Fortunately, the group was prepared for this. The lead and anchor person of the group turned on some sort of light around her wrist, not unlike the kind James used. Elise was initially uneasy with the oppressive darkness, but soon her eyes acclimated to the low light until soon it no longer bothered her.
She had to be helped by several of the children as they made that final trek down the stairwell to the ground floor. According to Franwil, this was their typical day, with only every eighth day saved for rest. By the time they reached the communal field among the six buildings, night had just fallen. Dinner was brought out and, for the next few hours, they sang and told stories around a large bonfire. Most of it was a big haze to Elise. She was so dead tired that she almost dozed off into her dinner.
Franwil nudged her awake and helped her to her feet. Otherwise, Elise probably would have just fallen asleep on the grass. “Get some sleep,” the elderly woman said. “Tomorrow is another day.”
She signaled to a gaggle of children to help her to her tent. Elise barely made it. She probably wouldn’t have without those kids holding her up. To her surprise, James was already sprawled out on the floor inside. He hadn’t quite made it to his mattress.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
His eyes fluttered open and an “uh” escaped his lips as he tilted his neck so he could see her. “Tired,” he said softly, then groaned as he tried to sit up. After one or two futile attempts, he fell back down onto his back. “Just come closer,” he mumbled. “I can’t quite move my head to see you.”
Elise was too tired to smile and instead just lay down on her side next to him. “Standing takes too much energy. What happened to you, tough guy? Shouldn’t this be a cakewalk?”
“We were moving mountains of dirt with sticks and shovels. These primitives are trying to change the course of a river by hand, for abyss’s sake.”
Eyes closed, Elise lifted her hand and wiggled her fingers. “Couldn’t you just use your bands and do that hocus-pocus thing you do?”
“Doing hocus-pocus takes energy, and I’m not going to waste it moving mounds of shit to divert a river of the same stuff. Energy is at a premium. Who knows how long I will be able to keep these bands charged? This isn’t like your time period, where there’s a plug around every corner.”
“No roast in every pot, huh?”
“What’s a…?”
Unable to crane her neck toward him, Elise grunted and rolled onto her right side, using her left arm resting on his chest to support herself. “Never mind.”
James opened his left eye and looked down at her hand resting on his chest, for the first time noticing how close she was to him. It must have given him strength, because he managed to roll left until they were facing each other. He looked a little uncomfortable lying so close to her. To be honest, it made her a little self-conscious as well.
“What I wouldn’t give for a bath,” she murmured, running her hand down his arm. She frowned at the dirt that caked onto her finger. “Do they exist anymore? Seems like personal hygiene has gone the way of the dinosaurs these days.”
James put his right arm on her shoulder and they steadied each other as they lay on their sides, too far apart to embrace properly, but close enough that she felt a tingle shoot up her back. The heat of his presence was comforting. The truth was that Elise didn’t know what to think of him. James was still the same Salman she had taken a liking to back on Nutris, but he also wasn’t.
The mysterious stranger she had crushed on was even more mysterious than she ever thought anyone could be. There was a broodiness about him, a sadness that seemed to suck the joy out of a room. And now that she thought about it, he definitely wasn’t as good-looking as Salman, either.
He must have cheated when he did that illusion thing with the bands. His skin wasn’t nearly as smooth and his nose was a little crooked. His eyes were probably a little too close for her taste and his eyebrows were out of control. Now that she thought about it, he kind of smelled too. Wait … she probably didn’t smell like a bed of roses, either. Nothing in this world did. But even with all his flaws, Elise still felt this flutter in her chest when she was close to him. James wasn’t the perfect man, but right now, she could tell he was hers.
She reached out and caressed his face, running her fingers along a faint scar on his right cheek. “What happened here?” Then she noticed the dozens of scars crisscrossing his arms and face, some so faint she noticed them only after close study, but some so deep, they formed ridges along his skin.
“You poor thing,” she murmured.
James rolled onto his back again and closed his eyes. “No need to waste pity on me.”
Elise kept her arm across his chest and pulled herself in closer to him. The two, too weary and exhausted to do much else, fell into a deep sleep, with neither moving an inch until sunup, when they had to do chores all over again. This one night, though, the first since she had miraculously survived the disaster on the Nutris Platform and then came to this terrible present, she didn’t cry herself to sleep.
James woke feeling discombobulated. Where was he? The surroundings felt unfamiliar and he was freezing. He scrambled to his feet and powered on his exo, comforted by the fact that his bands were still wrapped around his wrists. In most of his dreams, occurring nightly now, he was often left unarmed and helpless.
The faint, comforting yellow glow of the kinetic field expanded from his body and filled every inch of the tent, every signal and piece of information filtering back into his AI band. His body was shivering, so he willed his atmos on. Why did he turn it off? He never did. Then he remembered where he was and why he wasn’t enveloped in his usual environmental cocoon. He was now a fugitive and couldn’t afford to waste his levels on comfort anymore. His old life, as hard as it was, was now just a distant luxury compared to what lay ahead. He’d have to get used to freezing like this.
“Fuck,” he growled at the thought.
Even though it was so cold that his toes had gone numb, James felt strangely rested. He assumed that sleeping without an atmos would have affected his sleep. Instead, he had woken feeling better than he had in months. Then he realized why: he hadn’t dreamt last night. James couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
He closed his eyes and relished his fleeting peace. There was something else. No, someone else. Elise was here as well. Close by, holding him. He remembered her touch on his chest and how during the night, her arms had wrapped around his shivering body. And he had finally slept that rare dreamless sleep, and it was wonderful.
Elise!
Where was she? He clawed out of the tent opening, nearly taking the entire thing down. He was about to call her name aloud when he realized it was not yet daybreak and the camp was still. He swallowed his yell as he scanned the grounds.
The tribesman on guard, perched on one of the tall broken columns, eyed him with suspicion, slowly angling his rifle James’s way. The Elfreth still didn’t trust him. Of course they didn’t; James wouldn’t either, not after what the corporations had done to them following the Welfare Exoduses a century earlier.
Keeping his hands out in plain view, and feeling silly for doing it—he had learned it put them at ease when he did that—James walked to the base of the column and looked up.
“Have you seen Elder Elise?” he asked.
The guard nodded and pointed toward the river, where James and the crew had spent the past few days digging. James thanked him and made his way there.
“Elise, are you here?” he thought.
There was a long pause before she finally responded. “Hello? Um. Damn thing. Hello? Is this thing working?”
“I can hear you.”
“You scared the crap out of me, James,” she said. “Give me a warning before you barge into my head like this.”
“What exactly do you want me to do before I talk to you to let you know I’m going to talk to you?”
“I don’t know. Knock or something.”
“Knock. Knock,” he said.
There was another startled stammer, and then Elise laughed, her voice ringing inside his head. She must have been laughing aloud because he could hear her voice downriver, the echo bouncing off the tall black structures rising up from the ground
James picked up his pace. If she were any louder, she’d wake the whole tribe in a few seconds. He found her kneeling at the water’s edge, arms elbow deep in the slow-flowing sludge that folded over itself as it ran downstream. He didn’t try to mask his steps and she craned her head as he approached.
“Who’s there?” She smirked.
“It’s James.”
Elise rolled her eyes as she stood. “You’re hopeless. Do you know that?”
He actually had no idea what she was talking about but he had more pressing matters to deal with right now. He looked at the ominous buildings that shot up into the skies around her, their windows like blackened eyes, all seemingly staring right at them.
“You can’t just wander off like this,” he said, pointing at the high-rise on the other side of the river. “It’s not safe out here. There are more feral inhabitants in the buildings across the city than there are people. In fact, according to the hunters, a nasty nest of wolf variants took up residence right there across the street. If one of them decided you were dinner, I wouldn’t be able to save you in time.”
They were in an area far too enclosed and with far too many places to hide for his liking. The wilderness filled the night air not only all around them, but above them, in the abandoned buildings a hundred stories tall. Howls, barks, and the constant chirping of unknown creatures continuously emanated from the derelict skeletons of these once mighty structures as nature took back the land block by block.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve worked in a dangerous environment,” she said.
“There are also some very dangerous people hunting us as well.”
She shrugged him off as she set a plate of the sludge on a boulder. “I’m not going to hide in a cave for the rest of my life, James.” She turned her back to him and stuck her arms into the river, this time reaching deep down until the water reached up to her shoulders.
“This is not up for debate.” He knelt down next to her and peered over her shoulder. “There’s … what are you doing? Be careful or you’ll fall into the river.”
Elise rolled her eyes. “Cut it out, Dad. I have your atmos thing on anyway.” She pulled her right arm out of the mud and wiggled her fingers toward him. He just gave her a blank stare. She exhaled in exasperation. “You’re no fun.”
“Mud’s not much of a deterrent, though I think I have enough caked on me as it is.”
“Well, if you must know…” She pointed at the boulder nearby. For the first time, James noticed the fourteen plates lined up neatly in three rows. He walked over and picked one up.
“Don’t touch it,” she said, more sharply than he’d ever heard her speak to him.
James put his hands up and backed away.
Elise joined him and shooed at him. “They’re all in order.” She pointed at the top row. “Two hundred meters upriver before the sharp bend at three elevations.” Then she pointed at the middle row. “Immediately after the bend.” Then she pointed at the last row. “Four hundred meters down.’
“I don’t understand,” James said.
“The water is infected.”
“How can water be infected?” he asked.
“Like a festering wound. Back in my time, we called it Earth Plague. It was a newly discovered virus that sprung from a combination of environmental variables: carbon levels, pollution, radiation, ultraviolet rays … a perfect storm of bad crap upon bad crap happening. We first discovered small blooms of it in the Indian Ocean. And then reports of similar patches sprung up all over the world.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
“That’s what the Nutris Platform was for. The global governments realized that this Earth Plague was a real threat to our planet, and they all pooled their resources and gathered the most well regarded scientists to destroy the plague.” She bowed her head. “Some of the best minds on the planet. I had a lot of friends there.”
“I don’t remember seeing this Earth Plague when I was in your time,” James said, puzzled.
“We intentionally built the Nutris Platform in the Arctic Circle. We needed a clean environment where the virus couldn’t prosper. Cold weather hinders its rapid mutation rate.”
“I wonder why it was labeled a military installation by ChronoCom.” Or by Valta. He wasn’t sure who was in charge of that operation anymore.
She shook her head. “I don’t know where you got that idea from. It was a cleanser. By the time the platform went online, we were only a few months away from starting trials. All we had to do was refine the particle filtering and sequencing.”
James shook his head as a lump sunk into his stomach. “You mean if the base hadn’t blown up when it did, Earth wouldn’t be this mess?”
“We could have cured her,” Elise said. “Maybe I still can.”
“By yourself?”
“I can try. It’s not like I have anything better to do right now,” she groused. “If I had the right equipment, who knows? Maybe I can pick up where we left off. It’s definitely something worth exploring, but this place is a mess.”
James stayed with Elise for the rest of the night until dawn, acting as her lab assistant and pack mule as she gathered more samples and carried them back to camp. By the time Sammuia found them to gather for the day’s work, they had collected over forty plates, each carefully labeled. Elise had to recruit the two children to help move the small trays into cover.
“How is this going to cure the planet?” James asked as they returned to join the tribe for the morning assignments.
“Not sure if I can,” she admitted. “Not without any equipment. This is just more out of curiosity right now than anything. It’s nice to have something to think about other than this awful mess I’m in.”
