Prologue
She looked skeptically at him, her arms folded across her chest, her head tipped to one side so that her hair fell over her partially bare shoulder.He was supposed to be helping her with her homework and at first, when he’d said he had something to show her, well, she’d thought he planned to show her his—what did boys call it these days?
“No,” he’d insisted, “it’s something I built.It will just take a minute.”
With both reluctance and caution, she’d followed him up the stairs, past the bedrooms and into a cramped attic space filled with odds and ends that appeared to confirm the general belief that he was weird on steroids.
She’d hovered in the doorway, watching as he picked up a tablet and unlocked the screen.And then he tapped it.That was weird.Why didn’t he just tell his device what he wanted it to do?
He glanced up, met her gaze, and gave her a shy smile.“I like old school.”He glanced past her as they both heard the sound of a car door outside.He looked over his shoulder, craning to see out the window.“Close the door, will you?”
Confident now that he wasn’t going to try anything, she did as he asked.She waited for a few seconds, then moved to a cluttered shelf and picked up a pair of what looked like weird glasses.
“What are these?”she asked, holding them up.
He glanced up.“Infrared goggles,” he said.“My dad likes to collect artifacts from the past.I think those are twentieth century?”
His attention turned back to his tablet and she moved closer, wondering what he watched so intently on his screen as her fingers played with the strap of the weird goggles..
Suddenly he looked up.“Come stand beside me.”
Normally she’d have bristled at his tone of command, but curiosity trumped outrage.What was he doing?
She didn’t quite stand beside him, his air of suppressed excitement a little unsettling.
“What is it?”
“I’ll show you.”Again, he indicated she stand next to him.
She took the last step, turning so she could see the screen.It was swirling and pulsing with color.He’d brought her up here for this?When she was supposed to be studying physics for a test tomorrow?
He grabbed her arm and she tried to protest, but the words turned to dust in her throat as the pulsing from the tablet reached out and closed them in a swirling mass.Through it, she could see the attic, but it began to pulse, too, stretching and thinning.
Her legs began to tingle and she looked down.Saw the floor disappear beneath her feet.
He gripped her hand tighter, a long thin scream that could have come from her was the soundtrack as she fell.
Chapter1
March, 2531
John—he’d had so many last names and lived so many brief lives he didn’t remember his real surname anymore—looked out over the complex as a shuttle flew past the blocky buildings toward the landing pad.
His fingers twitched as he fought the longing for a cigarette.It was a bad habit he’d picked up in 1954.
“So we still don’t know who they are, where they are, or what they want.”Her voice was a stark contrast to her ice queen aspect.The voice was warm, charming even when Stella was annoyed—as she was right now.
He glanced over his shoulder at her.Yes, she was very annoyed.
A tall woman, she had availed herself of the options to refine her looks to the point she looked unreal, with only traces of similarities left between her and her daughter.There had been a time when he’d been half-way in love with her, but that time was lost in both their pasts.
Usually he tried not to remember that time when they’d both been excited by the possibilities—no, he corrected himself.They’d been intoxicated by the power and by the freedom to exercise that power.They’d made the future better, brighter…
John suppressed a sigh.If it was so bright, how had it ended up so dull?The world needed a few bad habits, so you knew what good habits looked like.
He’d been enough places, in enough different times to notice the increasing homogenization that had gradually over taken creativity.Or had it just been turned to innovation?
A little of both, he decided.There’d been no profit in being too original.It always annoyed someone.So they’d smoothed out the rough edges—though not the corners of the square buildings, he noted with wry amusement.It was the rounded edges that were gone.
