Loving

I WOKE up several Earth days later in a hotel. In the dim light, I noticed a crack in the mirror across from my bed. It zigged and zagged through the glass, ending at my forehead’s reflection.

My shoulders tensed. The crack in the glass resembled a fissure in the frozen waters of a memorable slice in time. One where I’d taken Calla to study what had happened the day I’d found her at Folkestone Harbor, when she thought I was trying to run over her, Shirlyn and Romaso with a motorboat. The Uproar had found us there. The water broke. We ran.

I threw my legs over the bed and held my face in my hands. Unshaven skin scratched against my palms. The Uproar. It hadn’t felt Calla’s presence at all. It felt mine. Instead of digging deep inside my soul to extract and amplify all sensations of guilt, anger and hatred, it must have felt my love for her.

My stomach clenched with disgust. An alarm went off in my head, a reminder. My love? How long had I loved her?

Surely I hadn’t loved her when she was a child. I gritted my teeth as I rotated my head to the left and right. I wasn’t that kind of person. I had many faults, but I wasn’t a perverted monster.

Yet I felt something tangible that I couldn’t ignore. I’d suspected my feelings for Calla had something to do with the Daily Reminder I’d destroyed. There’d been talk about a photograph. But I couldn’t remember what was pictured there. Calla had said I’d destroyed it at her TSTA hearing. Commissioner Reese confirmed that the Daily Reminder had been destroyed, as if it hadn’t existed. I couldn’t remember, but Calla did. Did it have something to do with me and her? Us? Had there once been an us? One that I couldn’t remember? If the Daily Reminder was destroyed, why was it that Calla could refer to it? If she remembered, then something, some change in the past still existed. It continued to affect both of us, even though Commissioner Reese said the Daily Reminder—once destroyed—would be forgotten.

Pain flickered behind my eyes. I drew closer to the mirror and rested my hand on its frame for support. As a result of all the traveling I’d done lately, my eyes had faded again. My hair was dark, like my mother’s, but my eyes no longer resembled hers. Not only because they were bloodshot. Aborealians had eye colors that imitated precious gems and stones, all rich and vibrant. Being of Aborealian descent, my mother had eyes that were a bright, emerald green. As were mine prior to using the travel glasses, and then once more after suffering through the Fire Falls. Continued use of the travel glasses had once again sapped my eyes of their color.

The glasses Calla wore likely did the same to hers. Muscles around my jaws twitched. I wished I could stop thinking about her. Was she traveling to the past or future? What was she searching, and who was she trying to find?

I sat back on the edge of the bed, struggling. Should I travel back in time to find the answer? Was Calla the only person with memories of what was pictured on the Daily Reminder? What about the commissioner and others present at the hearing? What about Ray? He was present for Calla’s hearing. Would visiting Ray be risky now that he was a member of the elite intelligence team that supported the TSTA’s Special Forces missions? Was he looking for her, too? All the jealousy in the world couldn’t keep me from hoping so. He was the better man, the safer choice. So, then, why hadn’t she chosen him?

I squinted and blinked as the questions amassed inside me. Blinding pain seared the backs of my eyes. A tingling sensation followed as stars blurred the corners of my vision. Why hadn’t Calla felt the Uproar until it attacked her? Had loving her taken that ability from her; or was my theory correct that sensing the Uproar was an inherited ability similar to travel talents? Was she was safe from the Uproar now because I was not near her? Did I try finding her again? Or did I stay away?

I pinched the bridge of my nose to dull the pain and endless questions. I had to decide. Aimless wandering wasn’t doing anyone any good. I had to form a plan. The answers I needed had to be somewhere, somewhen.

I stood up and paced the room as I searched, stepping over the blanket of my unmade bed that draped across the floor. Pillows sagged. Curtains drooped. Aside from Calla’s backpack, I had no bags, which I was certain fueled the hotelier’s suspicions that I was in trouble.

My travel glasses lay on the floor. I lifted the pair and turned them in my hands. In them, I’d captured many memories. They’d allowed me to travel through time and space, all by searching for a place—or person—I desired. The more details for the search, the better. I’d learned how to record important moments, places, people and conversations in the travel glasses by burning them inside with my thoughts. Sometimes the glasses had captured feelings.

My heart pulsed; each thud pounded in my ears. More than my own recordings were stored. Some of the recordings were Calla’s—recordings that she’d burned into the original pair of travel glasses invented by my uncle, Edgar Hall. She’d taken that pair from me when she escaped my palace, like a thief in the night masked with affection. To be fair, I’d stolen the glasses from Edgar after he’d altered them and refused to give them to me, having replaced the time-traveling pair with ordinary sunglasses. But I hadn’t tricked him—played with his emotions—to get what I’d wanted. Her kiss, delicate and cruel, still burned in my mind.

During Calla’s TSTA hearing I’d noticed that some of the data I’d recorded into my current backup pair had malfunctioned. So I’d asked for the original pair to replace the missing data. I hadn’t realized Calla had learned to record, and that she’d captured some of her own experiences inside the glasses. I’d recorded what I remembered of her memories into the pair I had now. Some of those memories included me, my past-self with whom she’d fallen in love and who had loved her in return. I was certain those memories had something to do with the photograph—the Daily Reminder—that I’d destroyed at Calla’s hearing, so she wouldn’t be held responsible for the infraction that involved me.

Later, Calla had fallen for me, the living and breathing version of me, one that wasn’t a shadow of my present-self. One that wasn’t a silhouette.

I placed the travel glasses on my face and searched, resurrecting a memory I’d recorded of her during the time we spent together behind the Fire Falls. She’d told me about her time spent at the Workshop in the Woods, Edgar’s Nowhere. I suppose he’d explained time travel to her the best way he could, even though he was lost—as close as one could get without disappearing altogether. He’d cared for Calla when she had no place to go. He’d left an impression on her. As did his death.

I tapped my fingertips against the pain building in my temples as my recording focused on a place surrounded by rock.

“I had a dream about him last night, Valcas—a dream about Edgar,” Calla said. Her dark eyes were sharp and serious. My pair of travel glasses had captured her face perfectly. “He told me that he would have taught me differently about time travel if he’d known I was a Remnant Transporter. What do you think it means?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “You’ve been through a lot. Your mind may be mixing things up and replaying them back to you in different combinations. I’ve never considered the interpretation of dreams to be a fruitful endeavor.”

“But why now? We’re so close to figuring out how to escape the Falls. It’s almost as if Edgar wants to warn me, to say something to me.”

I held her close, unsure what else to say on the matter.

My present thoughts mimicked those of the recording of me inside the glasses. Of course Calla would think that, likely hopeful that she would be able to see him again, to learn something that would make sense out of the mess I’d help to make of her life. It was still possible for her to see Edgar again if she wished, a past version of him that wasn’t lost.

I blinked, testing the idea as it ran through my mind a second time. A past version, a silhouette of the inventor who wasn’t lost. Someone who’d trusted and cared for Calla. I squinted in the darkness. My eye pain had subsided. I almost smiled. A plan had emerged after all, thanks to the crystal-clear memory inside my travel glasses.

My decision solidified as I stood up. I would return to the past, Edgar’s past. It sounded like a simple plan. And it would have been, had Edgar also trusted me.

I hesitated, sliding the room key back and forth in my fingers, trying to decide on a specific period in time to begin my search.

Edgar was dead, so I would need to visit one of his silhouettes. I preferred to gather information from a version of Edgar that existed before he became lost. One that had trusted me. That would be going way back according to how my world’s timeline worked. It would be pre-travel glasses. Before he’d altered the pair of dark lenses my mother had gifted me.

I needed to search for a version of Edgar with brown hair, lightly salted with gray. By that time, Shirlyn would have been convicted by the TSTA for having created a Daily Reminder, which she then inserted into the past of a Venetian she claimed to have fallen in love with while visiting seventeenth-century Venice. She would be living out her punishment, in prison.

As a result, Edgar would be fiercely absorbed in perfecting his youth elixir, so that he could live long enough to welcome Shirlyn when her sentence ended. He and his wife, Elizabeth, would have divorced by then. Edgar would be on his own, but I didn’t know whether he would be at the Workshop in the Woods; whether he’d stumbled upon the un-place; or whether he’d known someone who’d escorted him there. As far as I knew, it had never been confirmed whether Edgar had the World Builder talent. Usually finding out about such a talent coincided with a surprise hearing before the TSTA.

I sighed, wondering why I was having so much trouble constructing my search elements. It was usually much easier than this.

All this I pondered as I paid for the room at the front desk. The girl there had smiled at me. She looked embarrassed, I think. Frightened, maybe? Per my usual, I did my best to forget about such things, and what they might have meant.

After scouting out a large, open field, I regained my focus, slipped on the travel glasses and ran.

My muscles tensed and lengthened with each stride. White light replaced the blue of the sky and green of the grass and trees. Despite the blinding glow, I saw what I suspected Calla did not see during travel: the spirals. Dark lenses reduced the glare of the Blanching Effect—the brightness of the Everywhere and Everywhen. From years of traveling, my eyes had also adjusted. With them, I could see the bend in time through which I would travel to reach my destination. This allowed me to change my course when necessary—especially if I saw something that I would need to escape.