Lilah was getting frustrated. For one, she kept losing her backpack, which would only stay on her shoulders if she clutched a bare hand to the strap. Otherwise, it would unravel to shreds as time churned the wrong way. As frustrating and tedious as it was to keep track of, she ended up abandoning it beside a tree after snatching her flashlight and Jace’s penny from the side pocket. Another aggravation was that she could only affect a limited amount of space, and she had a lot of ground to cover if she was to find clues from her birth mother’s disappearance sixteen years ago. After all, she knew the exact place the van had been found, but she didn’t know what direction Willow and her mother had walked after abandoning it – for all she knew, they might have simply gotten in another car. And lastly, she had to keep scanning the same patch of forest multiple times, as she could never be certain that she was in the exact timeframe that she intended to be in – not in the beginning, at least.
At the very least, it was a fascinating hike, with plenty of interesting items that kept emerging as Lilah combed the forest: a single running shoe, a rack of deer antlers, a tattered mitten. Even an expensive-looking gold watch that was lost nearly two decades ago popped up from the soil as she walked past a large rock for the third time – in both senses of the word. The inscription on the back read, To Mark, with all my heart; certainly not a clue relating back to the Mayweathers, but a lovely find nevertheless. She buckled it to her wrist, just above the watch her father had given her for her last birthday, and was pleased to see that it stayed there even when she shifted to a different time.
Which gave Lilah an idea. Taking the Indian Head penny from her pocket, she turned it over in her fingers to examine it. Even within a time-frozen bubble, the coin was tarnished and eroded, dulled by a century of passing time. But when she dropped it on the ground, some of the rust and stains dissipated. As she concentrated on moving her immediate surroundings farther and farther into the past, the penny got cleaner and cleaner – until the copper appeared shiny and brand-new, with the Indian head and date – 1863 – clearly etched into the freshly-minted metal. Her eyebrows furrowing in deep thought, Lilah reached into her pocket to retrieve the old mitten she had found – relatively certain it was too large to have belonged to Willow – and placed it over the coin on the ground. She carefully wrapped it around the penny, making sure not to touch the metal directly, then momentarily let the bubble disappear. To her delight, the penny remained in its pristine state, even when she touched it. Quite pleased with her impromptu experiment, Lilah tucked the restored treasure into her sock, then continued on her temporal trek.
Along with the numerous discarded items she stumbled upon, there were plenty of animals that momentarily appeared – some she had never seen up close before, like red foxes and even a snowy owl that appeared from the soil. The latter didn’t fly away but cocked its head in her direction as though tethered to the ground, its black, glassy eyes gazing up at her with great interest before it returned to the soil as she passed. She mourned the animals each time they disappeared, but somewhere deep down, she accepted that the passage of time was both inherent and inevitable; it was her influence that was fracturing the natural order of things.
As she swept the forest, adjusting and re-adjusting time around her as she did, her internal clock appeared to be getting more and more attuned; somehow, she could feel the decades as they passed, could differentiate between one year and the next. It didn’t take long before she could sense the passing of months, weeks – even days. It was as though she was learning a new physical ability, like doing a handstand or juggling. With every fresh attempt, she was able to calibrate that clock ever more precisely, until she could eventually navigate to the specific date she was looking for. It was the hours and minutes that she continued to struggle with; that type of precision might take a lifetime to hone.
As twilight fell inside the vortex for the umpteenth time, she wiped the cool sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her jacket, catching a glint of gold from the corner of her eye. She regarded the impressive new watch on her wrist; it had a shiny, royal blue dial with four smaller sub-dials embedded within. They gauged everything from the time of day, to the month, to the lunar cycle, to the calendar day – a true perpetual calendar watch. Mark’s inamorata clearly had expensive taste – and deep pockets.
As she gazed at it, another idea struck her. She spent the next quarter-hour winding the watch to the correct month, day, hour, and minute, then unclasped it from her wrist. Kneeling beside a large rock, she carefully balanced the watch on top of it and let go, holding her breath. The dials spun wildly, landing on the exact date she’d been abandoned at the fire station. But the timing was wrong. She’d have to navigate to the specific period of time she was looking for – in this case, the minutes leading up to the discovery of Celeste Mayweather’s van.
She buckled the watch back to her wrist, which immediately pivoted back to the present date. But that was alright; she could hold the age of the distortion steady without it. With such an advantageous discovery, her biggest challenge in finding clues was not when, but where. But she was determined to find something – a wallet, a hair tie, a bracelet – anything that might have pointed her in the right direction. Whatever she was hoping to find, she knew it wouldn’t be much, and she conceded that she would likely have no way of knowing whether it had belonged to either Willow or Celeste. And so, when she stumbled upon a small, wooden rattle after three hours of traipsing through the forest, she didn’t hold her breath – until she saw her own name painted on the side of it.
Goosebumps erupted across her skin as she traced her fingers across the letters. Could this have been… mine? She gazed at the rattle for a long moment, willing some distant memory of it to come to her. The purple paint was worn and faded as she gazed at it in her hands, but when she set it back on the ground and shone her flashlight on it, it appeared fresh and crisp, as though the letters had been hand-painted yesterday. Of course, standing inside a distorted time bubble, they very well might have been.
As Lilah knelt to pick the rattle up again, a twig snapped behind her, nearly causing her to drop it. She whipped around and raised her flashlight, trying to find the source of the noise. From the corner of her eye, she saw something red dart behind a tree. She held her breath, expecting another fox to appear.
“Come on out, little buddy,” she coaxed softly, shining her flashlight on the tree.
It was only when the light caught two green irises that she realized it wasn’t a fox.
A young woman with limp, auburn hair was staring at her from behind a thicket of huckleberry bushes, her hollow eyes framed by dark stamps of fatigue. Lilah recognized her face instantly – it was the same face that had been following her around, day and night, beckoning for Lilah to find her.
“W-Willow?” Lilah whispered, her voice catching in ragged breaths. Her hand was shaking so badly, she was having trouble keeping the girl’s face illuminated.
“What do you want?” Willow croaked out. Tears streaked across her dirty face. “Are you with him? What did you do with my mother?”
“‘Him?’” Lilah repeated. “I don’t – oh, God.”
All at once, a sick realization gripped Lilah by the throat. Her seizures didn’t cause her to travel through time, as she’d already explained to Jace. And she couldn’t conjure anything to her side that wasn’t already there, in some form or another. Her effect on time was limited to the things in her vicinity that already existed: a pinecone resting beside her might show its future form – a pine tree, or its past – a cluster of seeds. But she couldn’t will a pine tree into existence if the organic matter didn’t exist in that spot to begin with. That was the reason she was able to talk to Marie two weeks ago; she had been sitting next to her ashes when she appeared. If Willow was standing before her right now, that could only mean one thing.
Willow was dead, and Lilah had stumbled upon her bones.
“Lilah!” Jace shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Lilah!” His voice was hoarse from calling out her name, but he wasn’t going to give up until he heard an answer.
“Li, can you hear us?” Stanley yelled, feeling the panic rising in his chest. “Lilah!” Where was she? He turned to Jace. “You said you thought she was looking for her biological mother. Why would you think that? What exactly did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything,” he replied, blowing warm air into his hands. The gray sky above had darkened almost completely to night. “But according to those articles, her mother’s van was found just over there, so it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
Stanley’s eyes widened as he followed Jace’s finger to the side of the road, barely visible through the veil of trees that separated them from the four-lane highway below. There were no streetlights this far out of town, but a full moon was rising above the serrated line of trees, casting white light across the thin blanket of snow that framed the highway on either side.
“Jesus,” he muttered. Lilah could be anywhere in the forest by now, looking for God knows what. And God knows what might find her. He didn’t dare let himself think about the fresh report of a grizzly bear den not too far from there.
With Jace in tow, the two of them made their way deeper into the forest, making sweeping arcs with their flashlights to make sure they didn’t miss anything. After a few minutes, Stanley let out a curse as he knelt to inspect something behind a bush.
“What’s wro—” Jace’s words cut off as he recognized Lilah’s muddy, tie-dyed backpack hanging from her father’s hand.
“It was resting beside this stump,” Stanley muttered, raking a hand through his hair. He was grimacing as though he was taking part in an internal argument – and losing. “Kid, I don’t think we can do this alone anymore. She could be lost, or hurt, or—” He swallowed. “I–I think we’re gonna have to call for help.”
“Do you see that?” Jace asked, squinting his eyes. He was shining his flashlight into the copse of trees just ahead.
“See what?”
“That… ripple. Between those trees. It looks like… I don’t know. Like a mirage or something.” He took off his glasses to blow on the lenses. “Am I crazy?”
A feeling of dread settled in Stanley’s stomach as his eyes followed Jace’s flashlight. “No, I see it too. Come on. Stay behind me no matter what, you hear me?”
Jace barely managed a nod as he followed. As they got closer to the trees, the ripple began to look less and less like a ripple, and more like a disco ball – not a spinning, glittering thing, but a curved, mirrored surface with millions of tiny facets reflecting the surrounding forest. From just a few paces away, the facets smoothed away to reveal a transparent, shimmering sphere, rising up from the ground with a surface that looked like rippling water. Standing in the middle of the dome, no more than twenty feet away, was Lilah. Her outline was dark and blurry, but there was no doubt that the blue jacket and red hair belonged to her. Her back towards them, she appeared to be talking to someone. But Stanley couldn’t make out the details, not from that distance, and not with the temporal distortion muddying his view.
“Lilah?” Stanley called. “Can you hear me?”
She didn’t move.
“Lilah!”
“I don’t think she can hear us,” Jace whispered, taking a step forward. “She’s… she’s in a different time.”
“Stay behind me,” Stanley growled, holding one hand behind his back as if to block him. “I’ve never seen her make a distortion this big before – and it might get bigger.” He took a shaky step forward as he stretched his other hand out in front of him.
“Chief Quinn,” Jace started. “Is that really a good idea?”
Ignoring Jace’s admittedly-prudent remark, Stanley reached through the shimmering veil with trembling fingers, then gasped as a cold tingle enveloped his entire forearm. He immediately yanked it back, examining the skin on the back of his hand. It seemed okay, albeit a little tender. All of his digits were still there, at least.
“I’m going in,” he whispered, taking another step forward. “You have to stay here, far away from the edge of the vortex in case she moves.”
“I’m coming too,” Jace said, his toes at Stanley’s heels.
The older man whipped around. “If she’s doing what I think she’s doing, she’s gone sixteen years backward. What good is an infant gonna do in there, huh?”
Jace hung his head. “I… don’t know.”
“I thought so. Now just wait here and—”
A rustle of branches cut him off, followed by a loud snort. Stanley whipped around to see a flurry of movement in the darkness. Something was making its way through the bushes – something big.
“Get behind me,” Stanley hissed, putting an arm in front of Jace.
“Would you stop treating me like a kid?” he hissed back, taking a step forward. “If that’s a grizzly bear, you’re just as helpless as I—”
“It’s not a grizzly, they’re all hibernating right now.”
“Then what—”
Jace sucked in a ragged breath as two eyes emerged from the trees – two eyes that were very high off the ground. Two eyes that had two very large, shovel-shaped antlers that branched out nearly three feet in either direction. Two spouts of steam rose from two big, flared nostrils as the massive creature let out another agitated snort.
Stanley and Jace clutched one another in terror as a six-and-a-half-foot bull moose stepped out from between the trees, bowing its colossal rack of antlers as though preparing to attack. Inching backwards, the two men found themselves backed up against the very edge of the time distortion as the bull continued to move closer. With a loud snort, it stomped its feet on the ground, ears back, hackles raised high into the air.
“It might be bluffing,” Stanley muttered under his breath. “They’re known to do that.”
“They’re also known to maim people to death and trample their mangled bodies,” Jace whispered frantically.
“If we take one more step backwards, you’ll be in a diaper.”
“Well, I’m this close to crapping my pants, so I really can’t complain.”
Stanley glanced at Jace out of the corner of his eye. Yeah, but if Lilah loses control in there, the kid might disappear forever. She’d never forgive herself… Or me. He took a deep breath, then turned his attention back to the moose, still poised to attack.
“I hate to say it, kid, but something tells me we’re better off taking our chances with Bullwinkle over here.”
As the bull lowered its head and dragged its hooves across the ground in a menacing show of aggression, Jace let out an audible gulp. He idly wondered how long it would take Frank and his mother to report him as a missing person – if he was lucky, it might only be two, maybe three days from now. But even then, would his body still be there? He felt his shoulders slump, then quickly straightened his back as a cold tingle cut across his spine.
Between the unstable time bubble and the aggravated moose, he didn’t have much confidence that there would be any part of him left to identify when the search party finally arrived.