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"Eat," I said, biting into a custard Danish.
"It's a little early for me," Bryan offered.
I shrugged and chewed my pastry, studying him. He stared back at me, challenging me to address the elephant in the room. Clearly, he didn't know me at all. But of course, he didn't. He wasn't our Bryan Fawkes. But no one ever called Mimi Wylde a coward, so I swallowed my mouthful of sugary goodness, washed it down with a swig of coffee, and said, "You can't keep stalking her."
"I'm not stalking her!"
"Bryan," I said softly. "You're stalking her."
He stared at me for a moment and then glanced away. "You wouldn't understand."
I snorted out a little bit of coffee at that ridiculous thought. Swiping at the mess I'd deposited on the table with the sleeve of my pyjamas, I gave him a pertinent look and said, "Really? I wouldn't understand? Of all the people here at this RATS, I'm theonlyperson who could possibly understand."
He said nothing.
There was a lot I could have said, then. I could have reminded him that I was from the 21st Century and not the 23rd. I could have pointed out that I'd lost my entire family, only to have them replaced with replicas from another universe. I could have told him I lived under a cloud of doubt at the Academy because my duplicate twin sister was flying around Time with RATS' enemy and my duplicate parents were trying to save her by doing said enemy's nasty business for him. I could have said all of that, but instead, I just sat there, staring into space, just like him.
Finally, he said, "It sucks."
I nodded my head in agreement.
"She's not my Sal, I know that. But she looks like her, smells like her." I was not going to ask how he knew our Sally smelled like his Sally. I had visions of him stalking our Sal's laundry, going through her washing hamper or something, sniffing her undies. It was better neither of us addressed that disturbing statement. "My head says one thing," Bryan went on. "My heart says another."
And that there was why hating this Bryan was so hard to do. He wasn't our Bryan. We were still mourning our Bryan. Liking this Bryan made that harder, but I couldn't dislikethisBryan. This Bryan had openly loved his Sally. He'd taken her to the local pub and showed her off to all and sundry. He'd flown with her despite RATS' policy of no fraternisation between crew assigned to a Vehicle. He'd flouted the rules for her, shouted from the top of the Academy that he loved her, kissed her more than once.
This Bryan had loved his Sally the way she deserved. But his Sally was dead and our Sally was a living, breathing, smelling replica of the woman he had openly loved.
"Piece of advice?" I murmured.
"Why not?" he said dully. "You're gonna give it to me regardless of what I want."
"That's the spirit," I said cheerfully. He snorted into his coffee mug, which was an improvement but not necessarily cause for a victory dance. "Get to know this Sally first, before you cast her as the leading lady in your stage drama."
"My life is not a stage drama!"
"Isn't it? Mine sure as hell is," I offered. I picked up the leftover pastries and my empty coffee cup. The cup got left on the dirty tray beside the beverage urns and the pastries got shoved in a paper bag, left out on the bench for just such purposes.
Stash of lifesaving nutrients in hand, I turned to give Bryan a last-minute directive to head back to his guest bedroom and not the dorms.
But his seat was empty, and I was alone in the mess hall.
For a second, I thought I'd dreamed it all. That this was a Prophetic Dream, and I was asleep in my bed, my feet having escaped my duvet and getting icy cold due to Shadowship's drafty walls.
But the dining hall didn't evaporate around me and Bryan's empty coffee mug was sitting on the table where he had left it and I could just make out the scuff and squeak of his boots as he walked off down the hall. I tipped my head to the side and listened to his retreating footsteps, determining he was heading toward the guest quarters and not the staff dormitory. Then I dealt with his mug and headed out myself to get some extra shuteye in before RATS woke fully.
I made it into the corridor, and then the softwhoop-whoopof an emerging rip alarm sounded out over the speakers, and I changed direction for Dispatch instead.
I wasn't on-call. I wasn't flying at all right now. Saying I was grounded would be technically correct, but considering we only had two MPCVs in the stable, I wasn't the only RATS employee grounded right now.
Two Orions, both of them from Bryan's alternate universe. That's all we had. Which was ironic, when you thought about it. Sergei Ivanov, RATS' arch-nemesis and the man my alternate universe family was working for, had stolen all of our MPCVs in a gutsy move that had damn near crippled the Academy.
If he'd known about the two Orion 6s we'd had at the time, I'm sure he would have stolen them, too. But they'd appeared out of nowhere, having been lost to the annals of Time, and probably Sergei Ivanov in a past incarnation, and luckily been overlooked. Orion 6a was now rotting in a post-apocalyptic alternate universe — doppelgänger Bryan's universe — and doppelgänger Bryan's Orion 2 had come with him when he joined our RATS.
It was confusing, to say the least, but that was Time. Especially Time disrupted by temporal paradoxes. Causal loops and multiverse interpolation and a madman with a grudge against RATS and a need to be on top of the time travel totem pole of power.
It never got boring at the Academy.
I walked into Dispatch as if I weren't wearing pyjamas, had bare feet, and carried a stash of pastry in a paper bag. Amanda was the nightshift dispatcher and glanced up on my arrival. My eyes, though, were all for the expanding sine wave that was front and centre on the main viewing screen. It was pulsing slightly in a bright orange shade of colour. International orange, we called it. The colour we associated with a large rip, usually an Origin Event, or at the very least, tied into one.
