“Hey, to him the horse was important.” She’d never forget the look on his face when they put Joe down. Nor would she forget how she felt when he kissed her. The man needed to live.
“Sorry.” Topher seemed contrite. “What is your plan?”
“Take this thing out, then come back and keep it from happening.”
“Roger to that. Still can’t pull you for another eighty-seven minutes.”
“That’s fine. Got anything on the name yet?”
“Yeah. Rand Brock. Texas Ranger. Went after missing prison transport June 23, 1886. Presumed dead. He was born 1849. Parents divorced 1873. No impact from the rift. I’m guessing that both of his lives expired shortly after the event. It says the body was never found.”
“Thanks, Topher.” Shay looked at Rand once more. He was staring at his broken rifle. He flung it away in disgust. “Five-one out.”
“What do we do now?” Lightning streaked from the building. Shay’s hair stood on end and the eerie light turned Rand’s dark hair to a strange shade of cobalt blue that matched his eyes.
Shay picked up her pack. “We take it out.”
It had been remarkably easy. Just circle the perimeter and place the charges. The only hard part was ducking every time a trail of lightning lit the sky, especially since it seemed to be right over their heads. If there were guards they never saw them and no one stopped them. They were both out of breath when they returned to their overlook and Shay turned on the remote. The explosion shook the canyon. Rand rolled on top of her to shelter her body as debris from the building rained down on top of them. Flames lit the sky and the angles of his face as she turned beneath him. There was another explosion – the airship, most likely – and then silence, except for the crackle of the fire.
His hand smoothed her hair back from her face. “What happens now?”
“I jump back to my time.”
“How long do we have until then?”
“About ten minutes, give or take.”
“That’s not enough.”
Shay looked into his eyes. There was pain there, reflected by the flames, but worse, there was loneliness. Loneliness was something she knew. She touched his forehead and pushed back the dark hair that fell across it. There was a streak of dirt on his cheek and she rubbed it off with her thumb. He grinned at her, like they were sharing a private joke.
Except there was no joke. She was leaving in a few short moments. He would be alone, in the middle of nowhere, with no way to get back to civilization and a fat chance of living long enough to make it anywhere in his weakened condition. He would die here. Alone.
“Care to grant a dying man’s last wish?” His lips nibbled at hers and her heart swelled inside her chest.
“Oh, what the hell,” Shay said. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. “Whatever you do, don’t let go. I’m pretty sure ten minutes isn’t going to be enough.”
They were still kissing when they made the jump.
The Walled Garden
Michele Lang
Spring 1988
Columbia College
New York City
He had left me for dead.
I think this is what bothered people the most. That, and the fact he had attacked me in broad daylight, as I had wandered through Riverside Park in September, daydreaming.
The doctors had established that he had onlytriedto choke me to death and had only ripped my clothes, not taken them off completely. So when I returned to school – my freshman year – with a bruised trachea and a battered soul, the other girls couldn’t kid themselves that I was somehow at fault. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What a downer, I know. But in the end, I was just another statistic in a gritty, crime-ridden city. Plenty of my ex-friends tried to rationalize me away, leave me for dead, too. I don’t blame them, at least not any more.
But at the time, I survived by staying angry, not by leaving the past to the past. I was used to being the weird kid: Mireya, the Puerto Rican girl from Brooklyn on a prep school scholarship in New England, now on scholarship at a fancy Ivy League school in New York. My mom was a seamstress, never finished high school. I already knew how to make my own way.
