Stars Across Time (7 page)

Andie frowned, both because she hadn’t thought Min-ji, who had been trudging along with her head down, had been listening and because she didn’t know why her friend would share personal information with a stranger. Unless she, too, had been impressed by his chest. That shouldn’t be the case. When Min-ji took the time to notice men at all, she gravitated toward other Asians, usually of lean build.

“NASA,” Mace said. “That was the space program, right? The government-funded one?”

“Yes,” Andie said. “There are very few slots available, especially now that NASA stopped the space shuttle program. It was always ridiculously competitive, anyway. I probably never had a shot, but it was the one thing that I thought might have made my father...” She closed her mouth. What was she doing? Sharing her history with some kidnapper? She glanced to the side and found him watching her intently. She remembered her thought that he might be won over, that she might exploit the fact that he seemed not to be wholeheartedly into this fiasco. Would talking about herself help that along? Make her seem more human to him?

Min-ji looked back, a curious expression in her own eyes. They had been friends for a couple of years—a lot of the women in engineering, astronomy, and other male-dominated fields tended to gravitate toward each other on campus—but Andie wasn’t usually one to talk about herself. Still, if she might gain something from doing so...

“I suppose it’s silly that it even matters to me anymore,” Andie said. “It’s not like I’m a little kid who craves her daddy’s attention. But my mom was a brilliant scientist and an astronomer, and my dad was very smart too. He’s a geneticist. They just assumed I’d be some genius, too, and excel in the sciences. They stuck me in all these smart-and-gifted classes as a kid, apparently never noticing that I was more interested in making paper airplanes and sailing them across the room than in having my nose in a book. I always wanted to play sports and go skateboarding with the neighborhood kids, but they put me in violin lessons instead.” Andie made a face. How she had come to loathe that instrument. “I was supposed to get perfect grades, get a scholarship, go to one of the best colleges. The thing was, I wasn’t all that smart, not like my brainy colleagues, anyway.” This time, she turned her wry face toward Min-ji. “Everything was hard. I felt like I was spending my entire life studying for something I hated. When I turned sixteen, I’d had enough. I smashed my violin and ran away from home. I lived on my own, scraping by, working odd jobs, and dodging the authorities whenever they found me and tried to drag me home. My mom had passed away the year before, and my dad was in this dark, unreachable place, so it was just crazy uncomfortable whenever I was back at home. When I was old enough, I got my GED and signed up for the Air Force.”

Min-ji was so busy looking back, her eyes wide with surprise, that she tripped over a rock. Fortunately, she caught herself against a tree trunk. Flailing for balance was hard when one’s arms were tied.

“You dropped out of high school?” Min-ji asked. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, I don’t like to wear the T-shirt and advertise my failures, you know?”

Andie had almost told Min-ji a couple of times, since she—and a lot of the other students—seemed to think Andie was some kind of hero for having been a pilot. It was strange having all of those young women looking up to her, but at the same time, it had been nice, and she hadn’t wanted to risk losing that admiration. It wasn’t as if she got it anywhere else. Her father had barely spoken to her after she entered the Air Force, as if signing up for the military was an even greater failure than living on the streets.

“It didn’t take many months of washing dishes and pulling up weeds around the hangars to realize that wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. I started taking night classes and eventually joined ROTC. Got my degree in aerospace engineering and became an officer, eventually a pilot. By that time, I’d been parachuting and skydiving, and knew I loved being in the sky. Not long after my first flight, I’d started to have the NASA notion.” Andie nodded at Min-ji. That much of the story her friend knew. “In part because I thought it might finally be the kind of thing my father would appreciate, and in part because even though I hated my name and hated all the stuff I’d had to study that I didn’t enjoy, I did always feel drawn to astronomy and to the stars.”

“Your name?” Mace asked. “Andie?”

She snorted. That
would
be the one thing he would focus on. Maybe the rest meant nothing to him. Wherever they were—
whenever
they were—GEDs and the Air Force didn’t seem to be a part of the world anymore.

“Andromeda is what’s on my birth certificate,” Andie said. “I’m fairly certain I’m the only Andromeda Kim in the world. I told you my parents were space nuts.”

Mace surprised her by smirking. “I have a name I don’t care for, either.”

“Mace? It’s not that sexy, but I bet bullies didn’t tease you about it when you were a kid.”

“
You
were teased?” Min-ji asked, her eyes wide again.

“Every time my teacher used my full name and until I got old enough and big enough to start clubbing people with my violin case. That’s how I broke my first violin, come to think of it.”

Min-ji almost tripped again and seemed to decide to face forward after that. Or maybe she felt she had achieved whatever she had intended by prompting Andie to speak. Maybe Min-ji had the same thought, that Mace could possibly be brought around to their side if they played their cards right, and she had been hoping Andie’s story might impress him. Andie didn’t know about that—if anything, people like these ought to hate soldiers rather than admiring them—but, as she had been thinking earlier, it might humanize her to him, if nothing else.

“You don’t think Mace is sexy?” he asked after a moment of quiet walking, his thoughts apparently not on her humanity, after all. His eyes held a playful gleam that was so different from his usual guarded expression that she almost tripped.

“It sounds like something you’d name a mean, ugly dog,” Andie said, before remembering that her new plan was to bring him over to her side, not insult him.

Fortunately, he did not appear offended. “It’s not my given name. That’s the one I was referring to.”

“Oh.” She waited, expecting him to share it, but he continued walking without saying anything else. “You’re not going to tell me?” she asked, not because she cared, but because he seemed to have been leading up to that. And, all right, maybe she was a tad curious.

Mace shook his head. “Not here. In private, I would.”

Hm, Andie wasn’t about to ask him to drag her off behind a tree for a private moment, so she let him drop it. Besides, his next comment flustered her, and she forgot the others.

“Your parents should have let you play sports. You’re very athletic and a talented fighter. You must be very dedicated to your practice.”

“I—thank you. Yes.”

Andie rarely had a reason to throw punches outside of the dojang, so she wasn’t used to people outside of the sport complimenting her. Especially
men
outside of the sport. Oh, her last boyfriend had wished her luck when she had gone to tournaments, and he had come to watch once, but he’d let his real feelings come out afterward, pointing out that women weren’t as strong and fast as men, and that in the real world, if she had to spar against a man, she would get her clock cleaned. Apparently, it had never occurred to him that she sparred with men all the time at practices. She’d never claimed that she could beat
every
man or even most of those who shared her rank, but she had been irked enough at his comment to proclaim that she could beat him. The beers had helped the argument along, and they had ended up in a dark parking lot, flinging punches at each other. She’d felt triumphant when she had thrown him over her shoulder and pinned him in thirty seconds. He, however, had broken up with her the next day. She had been haunted by advice her mother had given her when she was thirteen years old and doing fancier tricks than any of the boys at the skate park. Men, she had said, wanted someone they could take care of, someone who clearly needed their help, not someone who unmanned them by outperforming them at their own passions.

The statement had seemed so ridiculously antiquated at the time, not something she would have expected from her scientist mother, and Andie had dismissed it. But every time she had broken up with a man, those words had come to mind, the suggestion that if she had been someone different, someone more willing to bend and hide her true self, things probably would have been different. Easier. But didn’t she have the right to find someone with whom she could be herself?

By the time the sky darkened with the promise of dusk, most of the men were carrying a woman. Andie was surprised the group hadn’t thought to bring horses or mules to carry their captives. Even with her experience with longer treks, her calves were aching, and she kept stumbling, something made more irritating by the fact that she couldn’t stretch a hand out to grab a tree or boulder for support. Mace glanced at her a few times, as if wondering if she might need to be carried too. There was no way her pride was going to accept being slung over some man’s shoulder. She stared at the trail ahead and plodded onward, distracting her mind with thoughts of escape. There had been no chance to speak unobserved during the trek, but perhaps tonight, all the women would be placed together, and she might learn about the others and see if they had any ideas.

Up ahead, the trees thinned, and Andie let herself hope that they were coming to a clearing where the men would want to set up camp. Her stomach grumbled, reminding her that she had not eaten since the night before. But she refused to ask her kidnappers for anything. Besides, she had not seen them eat either. Maybe food wasn’t that plentiful here. Birds chittered, and all afternoon, Andie had seen small animals shooting across the trail ahead of them, but nobody had said anything about taking a gun and doing some hunting. Not that Andie wanted to eat squirrel stew. She kept fantasizing about Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza and a big, foamy latte from the coffee shop.

Their trail came out onto a wide road that stretched east to west, the faded asphalt broken into shards, much of it missing, leaving dirt and potholes. In places, brush encroached, with tree branches stretching toward the middle of the road. The spot seemed familiar to Andie, and she stopped to look around, noting the mountains visible over the trees.

“Keep walking,” someone said, giving her a shove from behind. Her guard sounded as weary as she felt.

Andie took a few more steps, eyeing the contours of the slopes rising on the south side of the road. She halted again and stared, stunned realization smacking her in the face.

“This is Snoqualmie Pass,” she blurted.

There should have been ski lifts stretching up the steep slopes she was looking at; even in the summer, they would be visible, with the bald lines of the runs showing where the trees had been cleared. But there was nothing except forest, and there was no sign of the lodges off to the side of the highway. Yes, the
highway
. This broken stretch of road she was standing on should have been filled with cars zipping toward and away from Seattle, but she didn’t hear the rumble of a single engine as she stood there, gaping back and forth. Nothing but the grumbles from the men and the whine of a nearby mosquito visited her ear.

T
heron sat on a boulder, the abandoned cabin where the group was camped just visible in the growing gloom behind him. A few other dilapidated outbuildings dotted the clearing, some so choked with weeds that one couldn’t have gained access through the doors without a machete—or a flamethrower. The cabin must have been used often by travelers, though, because it was in decent repair.

He squinted at his work, a sketch in his leather journal, the details growing harder to make out as the daylight faded. It was just as well. Then nobody would see him working on it. He had been reluctant to go far from the women, especially given some of the speculative grumbles that had come from the men about having their blankets warmed tonight. But he couldn’t be seen drawing maps and taking notes about landmarks; his fellow kidnappers would wonder why he was so eager to keep track of the way back to that time machine.

Part of him was tempted to take off as soon as everyone went to bed. If he alternated between running and marching, he might be able to make it back to that cave to destroy the machine and then return by dawn. That was half of his mission, making sure that the thieves no longer had access to the past. That would put an end to all of this kidnapping and stealing. But the women—the ones in his group, the ones in the other group, and any others the army could find once the market was discovered—needed to be sent back to their own time. When General Morimoto had given Theron this mission, he had spoken of a second time machine—or rather the
original
time machine—that was locked within a secret base deep within Mount Olympus, a unit that had been guarded by the military for generations. The general planned to use it to return stolen people to their time period, but Theron was reluctant to rely upon something he had never seen. What if he destroyed the one that he knew worked and they later found out the one in Mount Olympus hadn’t worked for ages? The general had spoken of a previous group that had gone back in time to hunt for the thieves, trusted soldiers who had failed to return. Morimoto believed they had decided they preferred living in the past to returning to the present, but what if the fault had been in the machine? What if those soldiers had never made it to the past? Theron would hate for his brash actions to condemn these women to stay in his world.

Even Andie?

The question came from the back of his mind, making him pause in his sketching to think about her. No, he would not mind if she stayed in his time, if she wanted to, but he highly doubted that. Even when he got her away from the kidnappers and the threat of slavery, she might not be that impressed with his world and the simple lives people led these days. Theron hadn’t seen any populated areas during his visit to her time period—the kidnappers deliberately chose isolated people and belongings so that the police and military of the past would not be able to find them—but he had heard about the great megalopolises and all that they offered. During his brief time there, he had spotted satellites orbiting in the night sky, moving in a way that stars did not, and had seen a passenger airplane flying overhead. Amazing.