Reversion (The Narrows of Time Series Book 3) (4 page)

“I’m sure it’s not that bad. Sometimes, bad things happen. It’s all just part of life. It’s what you do afterward that defines you.”

“You have no idea,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’m the reason the world is so messed up.”

“If my father was here right now, he’d say you’re a little too preoccupied with yourself. The world doesn’t revolve around you.”

“Believe what you want, but I’m telling you the truth. At least my version of it, anyway.”

She didn’t respond. Her perky face dissolved into something more placid. He must have hurt her feelings. Not a good idea since he was tied to a table and completely at her mercy.

“Look, I’m sorry. You have faith and that’s cool. I totally respect that. Don’t let anyone, including me, ever tell you what to think. People have been doing that to me all my life. It sucks, I know.”

“No need to apologize. You’re entitled to your opinion.”

“Still, I’m sorry.”

“It’s probably just the medicine talking.”

“Could be. My head’s swimming right now. Hell, I’m amazed I can even form complete sentences.”

“It’ll be okay,” she said, smiling. “Everything happens for a reason.”

“I wish I shared your optimism. But I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t afford to. Every time I do, shit goes completely fucking sideways. Like I’m some cartoon character.”

“You curse too much.”

“Sorry. Sometimes the f-bombs just take over. I’ll tone it down, but one might fly out now and then.”

“Look. Everything will be okay. You must have faith. This was meant to happen.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Regardless, you saved my life. Thank you. Not many people would have done what you did.”

She offered a tender smile, followed by a hair tuck behind her ear. “I’m just glad we met.”

Before Lucas could decide if she was hitting on him, the same fly from earlier buzzed Masago’s face and then strafed the table. She looked at him with an unfocused stare, then snatched the fast-moving fly out of the air with a lightning-quick swoop of her hand—never looking at the insect. She pulled a switchblade from a Velcro pocket on her duty belt and held it up in front of Lucas. She flipped open the knife and gave him a mischievous smile. Her hand shook the creature inside for a three-count before tossing it in the air. An instant later, she sliced the air with her glistening knife, cutting the fly into two halves, which fell onto Lucas’s stomach.

He looked down to inspect the remains—each half of the tiny carcass looked to be exactly the same size.

Holy shit!
The room was filling up with all kinds of crazy.

Lucas cleared his throat, trying to think of something intelligent to say. Whatever was going on inside her brain didn’t bode well for him. Not while he was strapped to a table with a sexy ninja chick carving up insects with a wicked grin leading the charge. He needed to shift her focus to something else before he became the next sub-creature to be halved.

“Masago’s a beautiful name. I’ve never heard it before.”

“It’s actually a boy’s name. My father wanted another son, but he ended up with me,” she said with eyes downcast. The hand holding the knife began to tremble, so did her bottom lip. “Nothing I do ever seems good enough.”

His logic screamed at him to choose his words better. “I hate when fathers do that. They put such unrealistic expectations on their kids. It’s not fair. All we’ll ever do is disappoint them—monumentally.”

She nodded as tears welled in her eyes.

He could relate to how she was feeling. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re amazing. If your dad couldn’t see that, then he’s a bigger fool than me.”

Her face lit up with an ear-to-ear smile. “Thank you. That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Lucas found her statement hard to believe. But then again, the elevator didn’t go all the way up to the top with this one. At least she wasn’t depressed anymore.

“Is Masago a family name?”

“It means ‘the sands of time.’ Dad was really into history and the meaning of stuff. He loved the early Japanese texts and spent years studying mystical and religious cycles, mapping them to current events. Everything was normal—well, almost normal—until he read some paperback book about chariots and ancient aliens. Some German nut-job wrote it, but I can’t remember his name.”

“Erich von Daniken?”

“Yeah, that sounds right. Have you read it?”

“No, but I had a professor in college who mentioned it once or twice. The book’s called
Chariots of the Gods
.”

“Hey, I was close. I knew it had something to do with chariots. Anyway, Dad tried to get the rest of the family to read it, but we refused. That’s about the time he started to go all squirrely, dragging us out here in the middle of the night. He became obsessed with anything related to the end of days and prepping, always preaching that we needed to be ready for
their
return. You know, to survive the alien apocalypse. Can you believe it? Aliens? At first, my brother and I resisted; especially after he told us he figured out how to catch glimpses of the future.”

“Really? How?”

“He’d meditate for hours, trying to tap into something called the Akashic Field. You ever heard of it?”

Master Fuji’s face appear in his mind, sitting on the floor of the basement in the remote cabin on Eutopia-3. “Uh, yeah. Once or twice. I have a friend who’s into all of the same stuff.”

“I’m not sure what it’s all about, but some of the things he predicted came true. Eventually, we had no choice but to start believing him. Well, sort of.”

“I hear ya, sister. Seeing is believing.”

She touched the back of Lucas’s hand, rubbing the skin with the soft of her thumb. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to again. The nights can get pretty quiet around here.”

A strange calm rose up out of nowhere and washed over his body. He wasn’t sure why. She was odd and major-league scary, to say the least. But the soothing feeling was what it was, so he embraced it. He considered whether or not to tell his new friend he was a scientist, too, and he was from the future. Would she believe him? Or would she think he was suffering from a snakebite-induced delusion?

He decided to keep his mouth shut. He’d already contaminated the timeline more than he wanted to and needed to stop the information flow before he told her even more. Two things were for certain: she was easy on the eyes, and he was happy to be alive. He wasn’t sure what to say next, so he stared at the flaming medicine balls warming his kneecap.

A second later, Lucas’s heart nearly stopped when a police-style red light in the corner of the room started flashing intensely. “What’s the hell is that?”

“Perimeter breach,” Masago whispered, before extinguishing the flaming needles in one massive breath. She held an index finger to her lips and flared her eyebrows. “I need you to stay calm and not make a sound. I can’t let them find us here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Lucas nodded, though he suddenly had a dozen questions for her. His brain wanted to follow her instructions, but his lips thought otherwise.

“What’s going on? Who’s here?” he asked in a whisper.

“Shhhh,” she said, moving to the other side of the room.

He tugged at the rope around his wrists, hoping to get her attention. “You can’t leave me here like this. What if you don’t come back?”

Masago hesitated, then used the knife to made quick work of the rope pinning him to the table. Lucas was free.

She held the knife to his throat, touching the blade to his skin but not drawing blood. “Don’t make me regret trusting you.”

“I won’t. I’m one of the good guys, trust me.”

She pulled the knife away.

He sat up and spun his legs over the edge of the surface. When gravity bent his injured leg toward the ground, pain swelled in every cell of his body. He wasn’t going anywhere, not without assistance. He waited for it, be she never offered.

Masago slipped on a bulletproof vest—Kevlar, size extra-small—and cinched it tightly around her chest with the Velcro straps. She grabbed the bigger of her two hunting bows and a handful of carbon-composite bolts from the U-Haul box and tucked them under her arm before spinning the handle of the wall hatch and pulling it open. The submarine-style doorway led into the next compartment of her desert abode, where she found a pair of night vision goggles on the shelf. Then she returned to the opening and nodded to Lucas to make sure he was okay. He gave her a thumbs-up signal.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she whispered. “Secure the door behind me.”

Lucas pointed at his injured leg, then shrugged, giving her a cheap imitation of a wounded puppy dog look.

She didn’t respond. There wasn’t time. He’d just have to figure it out on his own.

She ran to the far end of the stronghold, then scurried up the exit ladder that led to a connecting mineshaft her father and brother had reinforced a few years earlier by replacing the rotting timber supporting the walls and ceiling. The lumber was expensive, but her father was able to afford the proper material by using the generous profits he made from the sale of their spacious home. She missed that place in the foothills of Tucson—it held the last memories of her estranged mother.

Masago prepped her weapon, tailoring the feathered fletches before slipping the bowstring into the slotted nock at the back of an arrow. Her eyes peered around the corner, scanning the first section of the switchback tunnel. It led out of the mountain and into a desert clearing surrounded by scrub brush. She listened carefully—no unexpected sounds rustled in the darkness. That meant one of two things: the intruder was waiting for her in the shadows ahead, or he was still just beyond the mountain, near the perimeter of her detection grid.

Of course, there was always the possibility the breach was caused by a woman, but only a small chance. Men were usually her biggest problem, but not in a social way. More of a
I’m gonna take everything you have and then kill you
kind of way. When you live in the desert, and do so alone, defending the homestead becomes a daily worry.

The string of incandescent bulbs attached to the ceiling was off. Just as she’d left it earlier, after hauling Lucas to the bunker. She didn’t want to turn them on, fearing their luminance would signal the intruder. Instead, she strapped the head-mounted night vision system over her head, adjusting the gain on the Gen-3 device to maximize its efficiency. The scenery in front of her lit up through the goggles, showering it with a translucent green glow. The battery indicator showed 40 percent. It wouldn’t be long before another recharge would be necessary.

She made her way down the corridor, keeping her body low and tucked in close to the rock-infused wall as she scanned the area for intruders—all quiet in the section ahead.

Slow and steady, she reminded herself before working her way through the remaining corridors of the zigzagging passageway. Ten minutes later, she came upon the entrance of the mineshaft. No sign of anyone—not inside, anyway.

She removed the goggles, flipped the power switch off and hooked them to her duty belt. A signal booster device hung on the ceiling above. She stood on her tiptoes, her fingertips just reaching a strip of electrical tape covering the LED status indicator. She peeled it off. The diode was green, meaning the booster had AC power and was communicating properly with each of the security devices outside. The unit acted as a relay transmitter between the monitoring equipment in the bunker and the wireless detection grid outside. She reapplied the tape to cover the diode.

The fifteen motion sensors—each strategically placed for concealment—were spaced along the clearing’s half-moon-shaped perimeter in twenty-degree increments. Their coverage area spanned an area the size of a city block, with some overlap to spare.

Normally, she’d spend time each morning replacing the batteries in the wireless units with fresh rechargeables; however, with the recent Lucas distraction, she’d forgotten to change them that morning. She thought—or maybe hoped—the sensors may have malfunctioned due to low power levels, sending a false alarm to the underground equipment. If not, then she had another intrusion to thwart.

“Anything but tanks,” she mumbled, looking out the tunnel entrance. There was no movement in the area outside. Then a mix of dulled voices drifted in from the left. Men, as expected, just loud enough to trump the trickling water in the stream running lengthwise through the clearing she knew was ahead. She slipped outside, veering left and ducking behind a thicket of brush that bordered the fishless waterway.

Her feet crept slowly, all the while keeping the bowstring taught and at the ready, the deadly tip always aimed in the same direction as her eyes. The voices grew louder with each advance. The men were close—at least four of them, possibly more. She approached slowly, using carefully planted footfalls and covert techniques she’d honed during the years of living alone as a self-sufficient huntress.

The last of the thick vegetation was her destination, the same point where the winter runoff from the Quinlan Mountains fed the stream. Motion stirred through the foliage, giving her the intruders’ location—a thirty-by-thirty-foot clearing, just beyond the rushing water.

She stayed low and moved ahead, using the brush as cover until she could see the threat. She counted two trucks and six men—all slender, tall, and wearing street clothes. One middle-aged man with short-cropped hair and a stiff jaw carried a sidearm strapped to his beltline and was shouting orders to the others. He opened the driver’s door to one of the two fifty-foot, twin-axle transport trucks that didn’t carry any signage. The vehicle’s orange and black-colored paint was peeling and faded, but recognizable: old U-Haul trucks. A man climbed into the cab and shut the door before rolling up the driver’s window. He held a cell phone out in front of him, pressing the screen with his fingers, then put it to his ear.

She watched the other men fumble through their work. The precision, speed, and efficiency of military training was missing, meaning they were rank amateurs. They unloaded crate after crate from the hydraulic lift gates attached to the back ends of the twin trucks. Each four-by-four-foot wooden box had the words “Fragile—This Side Up” stenciled on all four sides.