Krystal Nunez failed her mission.
On purpose, of course.
Krystal Nunez: twenty tons of TNT packed into a petite frame, swarthy skin with flash-bang eyes, and wicked smarts Satan would’ve given his gold teeth for. A tattoo of small diamonds captured light in a constellation pattern across her cheek and disjointedly reflected her sardonic smile from an alcohol-infused energy drink.
She cocked her head sideways and spat venom at her three seated interrogators. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir. But, your man’s a little liar.” She lifted her pinky finger and pointed into the air, curving it slightly to emphasize the double-meaning.
The three old men who accepted morbid obesity as a personal challenge, squirmed and crossed their legs.
The oldest and largest of the Commanders, Chris Gossler, slammed his palms on the long table and failed to stand because his belly banged against it. He pushed away the table and a loud scratching against the cement punctured the spring air. A bit of drool formed on his lower lip as he gasped his tirade in growled spurts. “You listen here, you disrespectful young lady; we’ve put up with your ridiculous nonsense for months, against our better judgement, and only as a FAVOR to the Attorney General. You’ve done nothing but disrupt our operations, play cruel pranks, dismiss our rules, and inflict our entire division with your contempt. You’re done, you hear me! You cheated, that is what our third-gen Sensor, Tamptan Ellis said you did, and I believe him. This hearing is over!”
Krystal blew a raspberry. “About time. It’s not like I ever dreamed about being a part of this smelly boy’s club. But, just for the record, since all y’all old farts are clueless on how Timesensors perceive time in any kind of reality; and you also seem to elevate our word as god over truth…he never saw me shift. His only activity included toying inappropriate websites with his Palm. Yeah, yeah, say I’m a liar. It’s just cause you insecure men can’t swallow the fact I can beat your stupid obstacle course without cheating. Whateves. I say it again for the record. What…eves.”
That’s when the terrorist bomb exploded.
Small pieces of shrapnel struck Krystal in her face; it ripped through her diamond tattoos and chunks of her flesh dangled from her cheeks.
She slammed time to a halt.
Split-second by split-second she rewound time, slowly retracing the moments leading to the explosion. As the shrapnel rewound imbedding itself into her skin in reverse motion, returning to the source of the explosion, Krystal stalked the metal fireworks, a human ghost slipping through the web of space and time. She transfixed her timesense on the knapsack sitting on the ground leaning against a Cottonwood tree only a few inches from behind the last Commander.
She solidified time and stalled it. In frozen time, she unzipped the bag and rifled through the contents, her fingers sliding across the bomb surface without full sensory input. Her emotions muted, but logic burning clean. The device: simple, crude, and designed to distract, not built to kill.
Within frozen time, Krystal scanned the crowd’s micro-expressions for flickers of guilt. Herself and liar boy Tamptan were the only two Timesensors anywhere near the crime scene. The crowds of regular humans flooded the park with bodies, mostly new recruits for the DHP, the U.S. Department of History Preservation.
She opened her eyes wide and pushed back further to rewind time. She ignored the confused panel of fatsos as they scrambled to locate her whereabouts, altering time with the precision of a blind surgeon cutting with a rusty knife.
The moment arrived. Five minutes prior to her pivot point. The bag appeared. Disappeared. She flipped back and forth across the small slice of time. Bag here. Not here. Here again. Back and forth.
The Timesensor who shifted the bag to its location, a cautious and calculating psychopath, could inhabit space physically anywhere within a mile radius or more. Krystal searched to find a needle in a city of haystacks. The manufactured knapsack from high quality frictionless polymers housed the bomb, still glowing coal hot from the instantaneous location transfer. The mystery bomber grabbed the bag, shifted, and planted it all within a gasp of time. She couldn’t detect a ghost of a whisper of his presence, only a fine mist of unfamiliar particulates.
The smartest way to unravel the why meant living forward.
Krystal whipped her body around, focused on her pivot point in time, and pushed the timethread forward to ten seconds before the blast occurred.
…hearing is over!”
Instead of her previous retort, Krystal altered the timethread. She leaped from her seat. “Yeah it is! I’m outta here!” She flipped her head around, let down her long hair in a hand movement only a Sensor could do, and shook her hips at the panel as she stormed away. She timed the distance perfectly, and tip-toed around the corner of a long row of portable toilets.
That’s when the terrorist bomb exploded.
With strength beyond her tiny frame, she braced her shoulder against the toilet shield, the plastic absorbing most of the blast.
When the smoke cleared, she peeked around the corner; the panel of pudgy men now sprawled out on the concrete, a disgusting mess of flesh, blood and pathetic groaning. Krystal’s lip curled. She whispered, “Oh, um did I forget to mention the bomb? Oh, how silly of me.” She giggled like a ditzy cheerleader.
As she swung her hips away from the frenzied crowd, she whipped open her Palm Pad. Her fingers danced across the holographic numbers and a raised image of Aksel Electus in full depth display snapped into focus over her hand. Aksel peered up from his desk, eyebrows raised. “Why are you contacting me?”
Krystal rolled her eyes. “Always with the questions, Ax. How about a ‘good to see you, you hot irresistible thing you.”
Aksel dropped his feet off his desk to the floor and leaned into the connection. “Are you kidding me right now? You broke up with me last week and told me to never contact you again! Same question; why are you contacting me?”
Krystal furrowed her brow and forced a fake pout. “Um, we were drinking…. Look, now’s not the time.” She crossed the street, using her timesense to dodge the speeding cars. “Flex those detective brain muscles of yours. Research the trending explosion at Confluence Park during the DHP boot camp there and tell me…”
Krystal trailed off; Aksel had shifted, rewound to study the incident and caught up with Krystal’s timethread. “The news is all over it.”
Krystal waived her Palm at the semi-permeable door to enter a mini-automated H & M. She strolled through the images of clothes on the mirror-size full depth displays, searching for the friction-resistant section. Krystal stated the obvious, “A news Timesensor used future history to give them the scoop, or the bomber did the same thing. We need an answer why.”
Aksel frowned, his mind spinning. “I’m on it.”
Krystal waived her hand at an eclectic selection of friction-resistant clothes and fake-smiled at the underage checkout girl. Within seconds, her selected attire arrived from a speed belt behind the tiny storefront. Krystal waived her Palm at the scanner and tapped in a thousand-dollar tip for the girl. The girl’s eyes popped open.
Krystal undressed time, pulled off her uniform, slipped into fire-red jeggings, a sheer black blouse with a built-in bra incapable of working correctly and pink running shoes designed to instantly conform to the shape of her foot. She unstitched time, and the clerk stepped away as Krystal’s clothes had changed instantly. The clerk sputtered, “Um, you’re not supposed…”
Krystal whipped her long hair back and threw the military garb at the girl. “Can’t spend your life letting others tell you what to do. Oh, and burn my uniform, it’s an order.” Krystal winked and disappeared.
Krystal stepped out onto the curb and chaos ensued.
The entourage waiting for her included thirteen police cars, two firetrucks, one ambulance and a wall of enough uniforms to fight a small nation. At the leader of the pack, decked in an official T-Sensor white suit, the lying Sensor, Tamptan Ellis. Tamptan stood, his legs spread apart and planted like two stanchions, while the flashing lights bounced off his suit, morphing him into a drunk human disco ball.
The familiar sensation Sensor’s experienced whenever they found themselves within proximity of another Sensor invaded her timesense; an inner acknowledgement of outwardly unseen gifts in another person. Her body warmed as if a magnetic field pulled the blood pooled deep within her arteries to the surface. Her muscles loosened and tightened in short bursts of sizzling static electricity. Each Sensor’s genetic signature created a unique sensation and some could even tell precisely who the approaching timesense belonged to before they ever viewed them.
Krystal locked sights with Tamptan’s mirror sunglasses and jammed her right hand onto her hip. “Wow, big boy, I guess you do care.” Her inner timesense screamed at her: Tamptan, thirteen types of dirty. If he hadn’t planted the bomb, he remained complicit. An orchestrated set-up. No Sensor could be involuntarily held against their will. But, the peer pressure among Sensors pushed hard to keep shenanigans to a minimum; this kept their face out of the media and calmed the fear from regular humans. If she paused time and shifted out of there, she would be labeled a fugitive. She could choose to rewrite this moment a thousand times.
Aksel’s incoming vibrated her Palm. She whipped out her fingers and threw the image into the air. The quick movement caused a ripple among the raised weapons and one rookie cop accidently fired his weapon. Krystal’s timesense locked onto the bullet as it exited the chamber before she could ever hear the sound. She slipped time down to soft syrupy slowness, and the bullet casually flew by her head as she moved slightly to the left. In addition to almost accidentally killing an unarmed civilian, he exposed his terrible shot.
She rammed the clutch of time into full throttle, and the bullet smashed through the mirror-display of H & M, splinters spraying around her in a glassy flow. Krystal cracked her jaw. “That’s gonna cost the taxpayers…” she paused for effect.
She smacked time shut, shifted to the frozen rookie cop, ripped off his nametag patch, and returned to her original location. She released time and studied the nametag, “…Mr. Douglas Higgle.” She dropped the nametag and pushed her finger into her lip. “Oh, yeah, duh, I guess stopping you from firing the gun instead of grabbing your nametag seems more…how silly of me!” She slapped her thigh and faked another schoolgirl giggle.
She waived at Aksel’s hovering image and curled her lips into a crazy toothy. “Yes, lover boy, you rang my bell?”
Aksel coughed. “I’ve been shifting for hours. Your face is all over the news. You’re labeled a terrorist! Whoever orchestrated the bombing meant to frame you from the beginning. I can’t figure out who or why yet, but my guess…” Aksel stopped talking because Krystal had popped a drop of gum into her mouth and grinned like a skeleton.
Aksel squinted. “What?”
Krystal flipped her Palm around and scanned the cars for Aksel to observe the party. She rotated her Palm back to her. “I’m gonna let this timethread dance. When it’s done I’ll reset it when we identify our mystery player and kick that defective chromosome where the sun don’t shine. Thanks for your help, Ax, I’ll contact you when I can.”
She snapped his image shut before he could protest.
Tamptan stood, having never moved, arms crossed as if waiting for Krystal’s crazy to bounce off his implacable wall of reason. He lifted his sunglasses and scolded Krystal with his eyes. “Are you going to rethread?”
Krystal popped her gum and chewed it like a cow on acid. She jerked her thumb behind her. “You mean the premature egunulation? Yeah, no, where your department sprayed is definitely not my problem.”
Tamptan made his mistake.
The moment Tamptan accessed his timesense, Krystal reached out with the tentacles of her mind and locked onto him, forcing them into non-consensual timepause together. He tried to slide out of frozen time, but Krystal barged through and held his timesense with a chokehold. When Sensors paused time together, the intent involved mutual consent.
Within frozen time where only Tamptan and Krystal could exist in consciousness, the surrounding scene paused and waited for eternity. Krystal stomped forward and shoved her hand into his chest, wrinkling his suit in a strange pattern, void of gravity or motion. She ripped off his glasses with her other hand and threw them away. They stuck in the thick air nearby, rotating and hovering not sure where or what to do next. “Listen, Tampon, those glasses make you look even more stupid than you already are. You’d better start talking or else you will start begging God to build you your own personal Hell just to get away from me.”
Tamptan couldn’t shift, or alter time while Krystal held him locked in. He dropped his head into a condescending stare. “That’s a neat little trick. I’ve never heard of a Sensor who could enter another’s timesense against his will. How long can you hold me like this?”
“Forever, big boy, but you’ll be done before we’ve even started. It’s one of my many super powers. Now, how many more threats are you craving before you spill the truth?”
Tamptan leaned against his 2050 Jaguar TSX, his feet hovering in the air, not concerned about scratching the paint. Objects and energy couldn’t interact within frozen time. He spread his arms wide. “What are you going to do? Keep me in prison forever and bore me to death with your pretentious act?”
Krystal cocked her head to the side. “Ah, I see what this. You’ve got a crush on me. All this, just to get my number? Now, now, there are loads of other extravagant demonstrations to get a full access pass to the Krystal show. I’ve got to warn you, though, not digging those glasses. There’s retro and then there’s just plain dumb. You. Those glasses. Dumb.”
Emotions remain muted without the full access to chemical reactions inside the mind. Tamptan dropped his head back onto the top of his car. “Even if you could make me angry, it’s not happening in this locked timesense.”
Krystal didn’t need anything else. “You’ve told me everything.” She released her grip and they vomited out of the locked timesense. Tamptan’s mirror glasses dropped from the stalled air and shattered on the pavement. All the uniforms realigned their weapons at the startling movement but no one misfired.
Krystal snorted. “Guess these oafs learn quickly.” She rotated her wrists and bumped them together. “Which one of you handsome big boys are gonna cuff me, eh?” She batted her eyelashes to the point of frenzy.
Tamptan, shifting away his surprise and rewriting his micro-expressions of fear and doubt, stepped forward and threw the handcuffs on her wrists, roughly.
Krystal feigned pain. “Oh, ouch. I like it.”
An hour later, Krystal stretched out her body inside a windowless prison cell with claustrophobic concrete walls. She played in her earpiece her favorite Hip Hop song from her teenage years and sang the lyrics at the top of her lungs. A signal interrupted her Palm’s access to the web but she still retained her awesome playlist.
She used her timesense to shift and maneuver vertical push-ups against the rear wall.
(Chorus)
Oh baby, you know it’s true
A love like this I never knew.
Together, forever, we always get through
Everything I do, everything’s for you.
She pushed herself off the wall, flipped through the air and landed her feet against the metal bars. She arched her back and pressed her fingers into the floor. As she sang, and used her timesense to keep her balance, she kicked her feet outward one at a time.
I’ll protect you lil’ mouse.
I’ll never leave your side.
Counting on me lil’ mouse
In me you’ll confide.
Don’t ever doubt me, cause I’m strong.
Nothin’ I do, ever goes wrong.
I am your rock.
I am your wall.
Your strength comes to you
From the power of my song.
Look at me lil’ mouse
You make me smile.
The pain you feel
Lasts but a while.
As the reps continued, her breath strained, she screamed out the lyrics, waiting for a reaction out of the two guards.
The power of my hand
Strengthens your heart.
Not a force in this world
Can tear us apart.
I love you lil’ mouse
‘Til the end of time
And beyond even that
I’ll keep up this rhyme.
Cause keeping you safe
Is why I’m here.
Nothin’s gonna stop me
From crushing your fear.
(Chorus)
Oh baby, you know it’s true
A love like this I never knew
Together, forever, we always get through
Everything I do, everything’s for you.
As the song ended, she dropped to the floor, out of breath and sweating. She continued to taunt the guards. “Are you listening boys? Everything’s for you. Hoping to see what I’ve got to offer? I guarantee you, once you’ve had fun with a Sensor woman, regular girls will smell like rotten milk.”
The guard on the left rapped his metal hand shield against the bars, sending the annoying sound echoing down the hallway. In the same timeslice, a plastic electronic device hidden under the guard’s chair caught Krystal’s attention.
It’s about time, Aksel.
Krystal squeezed time shut, kneeled on the inside of the cell as close as she could get to the guard’s chair and stretched out her left arm. She couldn’t quite reach. Timesensors could shift their own bodies through space and time, but they couldn’t shift their mass through solid objects. She could rewind and escape at any time before entering the prison, but once locked behind closed doors she remained a prisoner. She might be able to seduce a guard.
But, facing reality, she didn’t wish to unravel the timethread until she had more important details of her current framing. And Sensors could not push themselves forward into an unlived future, the unknown variables would kill them. Once they experienced the timethread, though, they could rewrite with endless ink.
She removed her jeggings and threw them at the electronic device to extend the length of her reach. But, the lightweight jeggings slipped over the top of the device without catching it. She removed her shoe, tied it to one leg of her jeggings and pulled the device in, a calculated shoe grab during slowed time.
With the thumbnail device now in her hand, she unstrangled time, her back to the guards to prevent them from discovering her activity. Within the regular timeflow, she studied the small piece of plastic, fumbling to figure out how to get it to interact with her Palm.
One of the guards shouted at her. “What are you doing?”
Krystal peered down and acknowledged she had neglected to put her jeggings back on. She forced a sheepish grin over her shoulder. “You like?” She rotated once to allow the guards to examine the exposed section of her constellation diamond tattoos on her legs and thigh. “It looks super cool with the lights off.”
They yelled at her about putting her clothes on and blah, blah, blah. As soon as she could activate Aksel’s message she would rewrite the timethread and the guards wouldn’t remember a thing.
She lifted the plastic to her eye and the device activated. It connected with her Palm and Aksel’s voice punctured her earpiece.
‘I didn’t find all the information, but I did get a few leads. I’m exhausted from all the shifting, wishing for some of your stamina right about now.’
(Yeah, yeah, crybaby get to the point.)
‘I’ve been bogged down with my TS013 reports, the full force of the DHP is on this attack. This small bomb frightened everyone creating a full red alert.’
(Really, Ax, are you STILL whining? You wasted my precious seconds on this crap? Get to the point!)
Even with Krystal’s hands cupped over her ears, she could barely hear him over the shouting of the guards. She tapped her middle finger against her Palm to pause Aksel and shouted at the guards, “Would you shut up! Stop yelling! You act like you’ve never seen a girl before, come on! If I’m offending you, just turn your meatheads around. It’s like sauna in here! If you keep flapping your fungus infected tongues at me, I’m gonna take ALL my clothes off. And if you still won’t shut your mouths, I will remember this moment, rewind time and make both of your lives worse than a homeless guy without his quantum crack!”
The guards stopped shouting.
“Thank you!”
Krystal rubbed the gooseflesh on her legs and acknowledged the cold. She put on her jeggings and resumed Aksel’s lengthy message.
‘The first lead is an operation named Tornado. Whatever this is, it’s part of a covert op deep within the DHP. I’ve searched and cannot find anything more. While I searched, your name surfaced. Did the DHP recruit you? How did you get clearance and access with them? Why would you search DHP intel? I’m just curious…’
(What, Ax! Well, the answer is I hadn’t decided I wanted to tell you, not to mention it shouldn’t matter to you what I do with my own free will. Just got spooked by the reports of genetically altered humans being programmed into Sensor fighting machines. I signed up for the advance combat training. Never hurts to learn how to fight, timesense or no. You’ve got me arguing with you! I’m arguing with a recording of your voice!)
‘Anyway, we can talk about it later.’
(No, we’re not. Just because you said we’re gonna talk, we’re not now. Even though you’re a third generation Sensor, you are without the sight, and when I rethread this, you won’t remember anything about me or the DHP. How you like that? And now I handed you on a silver platter the complete picture of why I broke up with you, you stupid, stupid…man! Aw, snap. Called you a man, the worse insult EVER.)
‘The second lead is the name of a player involved, who might hold some insight into the orchestration of the attack.’
(Get on with it, Ax. You’re making me want to punch your voice.)
‘The name of the person is Christopher Gossler. He’s one of the big wigs in the DHP.’
(Yes, I’m familiar with said pile of whale fat. He made the mistake of calling me a liar.)
‘I’m not sure what you’re going to do next, but everything along this timethread is a dead end. I don’t know what you’ll gain by continuing forward, my suggestion…’
Krystal switched off the playback not interested in his suggestion. But, even though she wouldn’t admit it out loud, Aksel raised a valid point. This timethread, a perfectly constructed slice of history, manifested itself as weaved by someone who did an excellent job of concealing its purpose.
She would return to the scene of the crime and rethread.
She peered forward; the guards still gawked at her, their hands resting on their weapons as if they had any chance in Vegas. She wrestled with the idea of completely stripping for them just to get them even more agitated. Imagining their reaction lifted her spirits.
She opened her eyes wide and reset her pivot point, an ability only a third generation Timesensor with the sight could accomplish. Bending light through a prism, the world around her morphed and dissolved as she flexed her timesense. Back to the tryouts, back to the park, back to the bomb attack.
The blob pile, Chris Gossler screamed, “You’re done, you hear me! You cheated, that’s what our third-gen Sensor, Tamptan Ellis said you did, and I believe him. This hearing is over!”
Instead of replying, Krystal rewrote the timethread, leaped from her chair and strolled behind the three Commanders. Their eyes followed her, fixated. Chris growled, “Where do you think you’re going?”
Krystal approached the bag leaning on the tree near the men as she replied, “You said I’m done and this hearing is over.” She bent over, scooped the bag with her left hand, a gentle grip on her timesense to guide her actions, and dropped the bag onto the table. “One of you boys lose a knapsack? Oh, wait, this one isn’t Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, or Little Princess Buttercup. Definitely, not one of yours.”
She unzipped the bag; the red digital numbers counted in reverse, five seconds left. She ripped out the red wire.
The bomb exploded.
Before one piece of shrapnel could embed itself in her flesh, Krystal ticked back time and ripped out the blue wire instead.
The white wire.
The blue and red wire.
All three wires.
The red and white wire; the correct combo.
She snickered. “And now it’s clear why I don’t gamble. Actually, I do; usually an easy way to get a hundred thousand bucks, but shhh…I shouldn’t be telling you boys this, that’s a Sensor no no.”
The men’s faces glowed whiter than the white wire on the bomb. Krystal smacked the Commander on the shoulder. “Don’t be nervous big boy, your little tea and biscuits buddy Tamptan over there can tell you I just thwarted damaging your big chubby faces.” She squeezed his fleshy cheek.
The Commander found his voice. “What is the meaning of this?”
Krystal laughed, a genuine exhale of tension. “What is the meaning of this? That’s all you got? Do you hear how cliché you are? You couldn’t dig up anything more creative? How about a little bit of specificity? For example, like, ‘why and wherefore your little Tampon companion didn’t save you the first time around?’ He wanted this bomb to go off. He WANTED me to be framed for it.”
Tamptan stepped forward, a robot calm engraved into his motions. “This is evidence.” He lifted the bag containing the defused bomb and held it for a group of rushing secret service men. “And Krystal, unlike you, I’m not a meddler. My job is to observe and report, not interfere.”
Krystal squinted at his ridiculous glasses. The unnerving power of two mirrors reflected bright in the front of her consciousness. If he shifted from the future and witnessed her alternate arrest, the Timesensor Code discouraged him from sharing this knowledge with her. In a few minutes, he would cross the time intersection to access the alternate memory anyway, since a third generation Timesensor with the sight could retain the memory of all alterations to their timethread manifested by another Timesensor.
She jammed her fingers into Tamptan’s chest. “If you aren’t a meddler, Oh Ancient Watcher, then you admit you lied when you told our big boy Chris here I cheated on your piece of cake obstacle course.”
Tamptan handed the bag to the first man to arrive and marched away with them, ignoring her question. She almost shouted after him, but his answer smacked her tired brain in the face.
Tamptan hadn’t lied, the Commander had lied. And Tamptan couldn’t interfere or object.
She grinned like a wolf. The Commander’s face, still pale; maybe the bomb scare eroded his fragile ego, or maybe he deciphered Krystal’s awareness of his shady side. His narcissism prevented him from risking the end of himself, but the pieces snapped together clean and she found herself closer to the real picture.
Krystal opened her mouth to prophecy a snarky remark about their dinner date later in the evening, but instead, found a dirty foam microphone shoved in her face by an annoying reporter.
Krystal’s eyebrows snapped together. “Oh, yeah, no way, not happening, out of my way Barbie.” She shoved the microphone at the reporter and stomped away.
Krystal ignored the shouts of ‘heroine’ ‘saved the day’ and ‘women in uniform’ and the following second she shifted, disappearing in a blink of an eye.
Nine hours later, after following the Commander home, by shifting and hiding, she had determined the precise path of how to enter his house unannounced. Tamptan, or another unknown third-gen Sensor would be watching her actions, ready to report her activities to the Commander. A couple instances during her shadow recon, her timesense sparked, evidence of another Timesensor nearby. It didn’t matter. The Commander possessed no power over her, and once she reset the timethread, the Commander would retain no memory of the multiple violations she would commit, only Tamptan’s word of her actions.
Oh, and she would do it good, too.
Krystal smacked her lips.
At the pre-calculated timeslice, the front door unsolidified providing entrance to the call girl Krystal had followed. A tall gangly blonde, way too skinny, with short greasy hair. Within captured time, Krystal slipped through the door at the same moment the call girl did, careful not to accidentally adjust the girl’s body and disrupt her potential energy. Krystal unclenched time, and the call girl opened her mouth to scream. Krystal slapped her hand across the girl’s mouth, let the door solidify, and pushed her against the wall.
Krystal whispered, “Keep your mouth shut. I won’t hurt you. I need access to the Commander. In case your little blonde head missed the obvious, I’m a Sensor; no point in trying to resist. I can respool this a thousand times.”
When the call girl’s eyes reduced to normal sized circles, Krystal removed her hand. Tears welled, two mercury balls jiggling in the corner of the girl’s eyes. “Please. You will not murder him? I must pay my bills! He is my best client, I cannot afford to lose him.”
The girl’s voice betrayed either a real or fake Russian accent. Krystal didn’t hide the disdain in her voice. “Honeypot, you need to face the facts. This guy is ancient, and even if he ain’t gonna die tomorrow, he’ll soon be too weak to be ordering your taco delivery. My suggestion: find another source of income. Now, I’m not gonna kill him. Rough him up a bit, sure. Scare him? Oh, you can bet your best trick he’s gonna be crying for mommy when I’m done with him. Just wait down here and I’ll be done before you can say pimp daddy. Or if you’re not down for a little S & M without the M, then leave. Either way, doesn’t matter, you won’t remember this conversation soon enough.”
Krystal almost stepped onto the stairs to his bedroom, when she spoke again to the call girl. “Hey, you. Mouth shut!”
The girl dropped into the air sofa and whimpered, holding on to her tiny purse like a life preserver.
Krystal sprinted across the carpet steps, burst through the bedroom and shouted, “Here’s Johnny!”
Instead of discovering the Commander waiting for the call girl in his luxury-comfort bed, a dusky glow of particulates shimmered in the air for a lingering moment. A busted third story window, an empty bed, and overwhelming evidence another Sensor moved the Commander’s body, seconds before.
Stupid. The move probably killed him. A Sensor can translocate most inorganic objects through space, though never through time. Organic material, especially other humans, could not be moved through space without disrupting the molecular balance of the person. A Sensor’s nervous system encompassed energy displacement filters, hardwired and networked throughout the entire body’s circuitry. Atoms vibrated at rapid frequencies, but when built into organisms with cells, the disruption caused by instantaneous travel tended to burst the cells apart into destructive chaos. Moving an average human during a timepause could be dangerous, if not fatal, depending on the time and distance involved.
The secret Sensor ignored the choice of simply drugging the Commander to move him safely, but the heat trail and faded particulate outline on the bed revealed otherwise. It meant the Sensor acted in a hurry. Krystal missed her window by moments.
The unknown Sensor probably intended to kill the Commander either way. The current timethread appeared intended to frame her again for the murder of the Commander, though this one would prove a bit harder to pin on her.
Krystal frowned. All her happy hopes revolving around wrapping the Commander with duct tape, whipping him with his own freaky chains, and forcing him to beg for mercy like a pathetic junkie without a fix, flew out the broken window and followed the fleeting shadow of an alternate timethread.
This Sensor was starting to piss her off.
Krystal stepped to the window to examine the broken glass; three stories down another plethora of police cars, ambulances, fire trucks and night crew imbeciles waited for her. As always, leader of the pack, the white suited pimple, Tamptan, pointing. She yelled at him, “Hey, doofus, it’s night time, take off those stupid gla…”
A holy tirade of bullets sprayed the third story. Krystal slipped time down into first gear and shifted out of the way of the bullets. She stopped time completely, rewound about thirty seconds, sailed down the steps in reverse, and flicked on time.
The call girl gasped, wide eyed, and clutched her purse with a death grip. Krystal resisted her urge to lecture her; it didn’t matter because she would soon dissolve this entire timethread with acid and the girl wouldn’t remember. Krystal reached forward and snatched the girl’s Palm hand. “Listen, Make-Over-Due, I need your contact info.”
The call girl tilted her head to the side, like a dog hearing the word ‘treat’. “Here is my e-card.” She reached inside her purse.
Krystal clicked her tongue. “No, I need access to your Dark Web website. I need pics.”
The call girl’s mouth dropped open for a second, and then a half smile crept across her face.
Krystal grunted. “Hurry! I’m not gonna hire you, trust me. I don’t pay for my fun, I get my kicks for free.”
The call girl’s grin collapsed into a pout. She waived her Palm and Krystal’s Palm accepted the info. Krystal had to read and digest the info with her eidetic memory because once she reset the timethread, her Palm wouldn’t retain the future information.
“Thanks, Yellow Snow, er, I mean, Bright Glow, and do yourself a favor. Get your hair fixed. I mean, with today’s technology…”
Krystal didn’t bother finishing her insult before she reset her pivot point, the horror splashed across Bright Glow’s face brought her the satisfaction she needed.
Krystal collapsed into the past, exhausted and starving from shifting. She slid into the timethread where she defused the bomb and three pale white faces lasered in on her movements. Krystal smacked the Commander on the shoulder. “Don’t be nervous big boy, your little tea and biscuits buddy Tamptan over there can tell you I just thwarted damaging your big chubby faces.” She squeezed his fleshy cheek.
The Commander found his voice. “What is the meaning of this?”
Krystal altered the timethread. Instead of insulting him, Krystal jerked her thumb at Tamptan. “Ask your boy again about how qualified I am to be an agent.”
The Commander’s color returned to his face and now it resembled a ripe tomato. He stammered, “What are you talking…”
Tamptan reached out and placed his large hand on Krystal’s bony shoulder. She flinched, and then reeled in her response, rewriting it with a measured calm and fake patience. “You’re gonna tell the Commander about how I passed the course deserving a few of those purply medals.”
Tamptan ignored her and reached for the bag. “This is evidence.” The service men raced behind him.
Krystal envisioned a laser knife boring two neat holes through his mirror glasses to give her access to his lying eyes. He shifted timethreads with the precision of a shotgun. Evidence of his future shifting reflected from this current Tamptan of now, she accepted this deep within her gut. He danced one step ahead of her.
Krystal squeezed her death grip around the bag.
The Commander stood, careful to scoot his chair away first and not catch his belly on the edge of the table. “Krystal, I’m not sure what’s going on here…”
Tamptan wouldn’t give her anything. She pulled out her trump card. She popped open her Palm, accessed Bright Glow’s online pictures, chose the most scandalous one, and sent it ‘urgent’ to the Commander’s Palm.
The Commander didn’t bother asking how she managed to hack him; he glanced at his Palm. He quickly snapped his fingers closed before his fellow officers caught a glimpse. The Commander swallowed hard.
Krystal batted her eyelashes at the Commander and pushed her index finger into her lip. “Um, yeah, and don’t fool yourself; I can also download the one where ‘you know who’ is doing ‘you know what’ with ‘you know who’. I’m sure you’re dying for your granddaughter to digest such disgust all over the webcasts…”
The Commander, crushed, clamped his mouth shut.
Tamptan, his robot calm ever present, cleared his throat. “Blackmail?”
Krystal grunted. “Blackmail, white whale, whateves. What you label blackmail, I refer to as winning at negotiation. Commander, in the light of new and overwhelming evidence, are you now assigning me to the tall and handsome Tamptan? What, are you serious, I get to tag along with him and find the terrorist? Wow, whatever will I do with such an amazing opportunity?”
The secret service men stood behind Tamptan, bulls stomping the ground. The Commander staggered away from the table. “She’s all yours, Tamptan. Keep both eyes on her.”
For the first time since they met, Tamptan lost his cool exterior for a moment. He grabbed his glasses and flipped them off his blazing eyes. “Are you serious? You can’t leave my sight. And, even if she passed the course, she isn’t an agent, she still needs…”
The Commander, huffing and puffing and stumbling away from the scene, about to be bombarded by the reporters, screamed, “She’s your problem! Keep her out of my way!”
Tamptan crushed his sunglasses. Then, with the calm of a Buddhist Monk, he rewound the crushing and rethread his mini explosion. Krystal still retained the alternative, but he saved face in front of his men.
Tamptan dropped his hand outward and snapped his fingers.
Krystal slipped the handle of the bag around his arm and grinned seductively. “Looks like it’s the Krystal-Tampon show, now.”
Tamptan ignored her comment, gave instructions to his men, and followed them. The diffused bomb ended up with another group of men who followed the Commander.
Krystal bounced along behind Tamptan, skipping her feet a couple times, and cheering them on. She ran alongside Tamptan’s fast pace. “Hey, can we get a Park Burger, I’m starving!”
Tamptan didn’t break his cool again, but forced his stride, strong and steady.
When they arrived at the sleek Airbus Master SRTXX helicopter idling on the opposite side of the park, eight of the secret service men, Tamptan and Krystal’s not quite as perky self, jumped inside the craft. The doors solidified and the soldiers grabbed their seats and strapped in. She found the only open seat located at the far end of the aircraft.
Krystal grabbed onto a ceiling strap, snapped a hand into her hip, and stationed herself in front of Tamptan, glaring.
The officer sitting next to Tamptan grumbled, “You should sit down and strap in.”
Krystal ignored him. “Oh, my number one fan, you gonna tell me what’s going on here? This ‘only observe and report’ is a bunch of regurgitated rat turds. Why you keep trying to pin the Commander’s death on me?”
Tamptan’s face, a chiseled rock.
Krystal flipped open her Palm and connected to Aksel, setting her background to blank to hide her location. Aksel peered up from his desk, eyebrows raised. “Why are you contacting me?”
For a split second, Déjà vu, an unheard-of phenomenon among Sensors, since they could reconstruct every detail of every moment, threatened her mind. The exhaustion and hunger slowed her mindflexes. She had rewound the timethread and relived over her original comment. Without the third-gen sight, Aksel couldn’t recall Krystal’s rethreads. She grunted and resumed, “Always with the questions, Ax. How about a ‘good to see you, you hot irresistible thing you.”
Aksel dropped his feet off his desk to the floor and leaned into the connection. “Are you kidding me right now? You broke up with me last week and told me to never contact you again! Same question; why are you contacting me?”
Krystal furrowed her brow and forced a fake pout. “Um, we were drinking…. Look, now is not the time. Flex those detective brain muscles of yours. Research the trending thwarted terrorist attack at Confluence Park during the DHP boot camp there and tell me…”
Krystal trailed off; Aksel had shifted, rewound to study the incident and caught up with Krystal’s current timethread. “The news is all over it.”
“You must focus on a few things. There is an operation Tornado; I need every detail you can find, no matter how small. Cash in some favors, get me some intel, bro. Also, I need info on Christopher Gossler. Cross reference him with a douche bag named Tamptan Ellis and a lady of the night with the stage name of Bright Glow. I’m guessing she’s Russian or Ukrainian or something.”
The agent sitting next to Tamptan squirmed in his seat, unholstered his automatic handgun made of 100% polymers and pointed it at Krystal. Tamptan gently lowered the man’s weapon with his steady fingers.
Krystal continued, “Absolutely no idea what I’m searching for, but I guarantee you’ll figure it out when you find it.”
Aksel frowned, his mind spinning. “I’m on it.”
Krystal snapped her Palm shut. The agro agent stared her down, a pit bull ready to bite. He growled, “Should we knock her out?”
Krystal wrinkled her nose. “So serious, so serious, so serious! As if you could…but, you’d enjoy trying, big boy.” She leaned into Tamptan’s glasses and adjusted her bangs by the reflection. For a sliver of time, she hoped Tamptan might lose his cool boy act and engage her in battle. The image of him wresting her sent goosebumps down her limbs.
Tamptan didn’t take the bait. He ordered, “Please, sit down, Miss Nunez, you’re making me nauseous.”
The turbulence kicked in; Krystal’s timesense automatically adjusted her body, and though the flash movements remained hidden from secret service men, Tamptan absorbed her constant balance alterations. Blurry Krystal overwhelmed Tamptan’s equilibrium.
Krystal obliged. “Scoot over, Tonto.” She grabbed the pit bull agent, used her timesense to chop time into bullet points, unfastened his seatbelt, knocked his weapon out of his hand, dug her long nails into his collar, revved time to normal RPM’s, and flung the agent across the airbus before he could react. The pit bull landed on top of another agent, and stifled laughs sputtered around the confined space.
Krystal dropped down into the now empty seat next to Tamptan, and threw her hip into his waist with a quick jerk. “How’s that, big boy. Comfy?”
Tamptan waived a hand single at the pilot, the airbus maneuvered and Tamptan gripped his straps with white knuckles. “You’re full of good qualities Krystal, I’m not sure why you insist on humiliating my men. Did Daddy smack around his little girl?”
Tamptan may or may not have conducted much research on her; he groped to push her buttons. It didn’t matter, though, because his anger prompted him to converse. “Ha! Psychoanalyzing me now, I love it! Don’t worry your precious little self, I love men. It’s just stupid men I can’t tolerate. And, unfortunately, there is plethora of those around. The stupidity is like one of those virus infected boogers you can’t get off your finger, and it even spreads to the smart brave guys like you. Smart one second, wearing mirror sunglasses the next. Don’t be sad. You’re a hottie, even if a bit stiff, though that can be a good thing…”
One of the men shouted, “Does she ever shut up?” The group laughed, the tension dripping.
Krystal licked her lips. “When I shut up, that’s when bad things happen.” She flipped her hair.
Aksel’s incoming vibrated her Palm. She ignored it, and flicked her fingers across the pads of her Palm. She instructed him to send her information via text. A moment later, she opened her fingers slightly and read the concealed message.
‘My sources tell me Bright Glow is a code name for a sleeper agent. Not sure if she works for Russian Intelligence or it is possible she is one of our own, working both sides. Hitting dead ends and her existence is a careful construction of false identities. Couldn’t tell you her agenda. Found nothing on Chris Gossler, he’s scrubbed clean. But, Tornado sparked some interest. Found a couple of conspiracy theory sites devoted to the operation. Mostly involves government and T-Sensor activity.’
The message stopped.
Using her timesense she typed quicker than a regular human could, pausing time in between letter punches, and replied to Aksel, ‘Sensor involvement…’
Aksel’s text responded, ‘Your guess as good as mine. Could be instigated by them, or they could be the target. No more credible information or plausible theories. Here’s the website in case you are able to glean something from the crackpots running it.’
Krystal snapped out a quick, ‘Thanks,’ and clenched her Palm.
Over the intercom, the pilot of the airbus cried out, “We have a problem. Incoming missile and our countermeasures are jammed.”
The siren sounded and Tamptan shifted instantaneously from his seat to the middle of the cockpit. His fingers danced faster than lightening, attempting to reprogram the controls. He shouted at the pilot, “Evasive maneuvers, now!”
The airbus creaked under the sudden switch in altitude and the thrust of trajectory change; during the same moment Krystal’s timesense tingled down her spine. She didn’t hesitate; she paused time, shifted to the door, let a small drip of time move forward and cranked open the door handle. The airbus, now ninety degrees rotated, traveled downward and to the right. The open door hovered directly above the ground. She thrust time shut, pushed her body through the threshold, and swam through the air like an intoxicated shark. After she moved her body far enough from the blast, she unbolted time, and gravity kicked in to pull her down into freefall. The missile hit the airbus in the bottom middle, directly below the center of gravity where the fuel tank resided. The airbus exploded and the shockwave smacked Krystal full force against her body. She grasped onto her timesense, shifted further away from the blast, and paused again, hovering in the air.
She must think!
No sign of Tamptan. Her timesense didn’t detect him; either hid himself far away or he had succumbed to the other improbable scenario. She refused to accept his death since killing a Sensor proved almost impossible. His ‘observe and report’ nonsense probably didn’t involve saving the lives of his men. Fortunately, for the world, her timepause muted her emotions.
She could overlook the attempt to manipulate her and get in her way. But, shame on the fool who aimed to kill her.
Even though the logical part of her acknowledged any human having dealings with Sensors accepted the fact they couldn’t be killed, she still took this missile attack personal.
Oh, it’s on like a final fighter’s song.
With a raging fire erupting from the base of her gut, she reversed time, lifted her fist into the air, and sliced through the atmosphere, unconcerned of the g-forces she exerted on herself, burning her energy as if she had an unlimited supply. The missile exited the airbus backward, and Krystal sliced through the air, using her timesense to reposition herself in space, and placed herself in front of the missile. She followed the missile as she reversed time and kept her body at its nose to camouflage her heat signature as well as stay ahead of the missile’s propulsion.
Sixty seconds in reverse time and an untracked distance later, the missile retracted itself into a DHP soldier holding a portable missile launcher. Krystal let time flow in reverse without her movement for a few extra seconds, and then she pointed all her potential energy at the incriminated soldier. She kicked time back into full throttle and slammed her body into his, seconds before he launched the missile.
They both tumbled through the rocky terrain, the launcher smashing into the nearby pile of stones, and Krystal skidded across the ground, scraping rips along her body without mercy. She paused and realigned time, jumped into a sprint, and raced over to the fallen solider. He lay unconscious. She reached down and grabbed his wrist to access his Palm.
She slammed open her own Palm. “Aksel!”
His face materialized into full depth display. His eyes opened wide and his mouth dropped open. “Are you okay! You’re bleeding everywhere!”
Krystal punctured a sadistic smile through her bloody lips and teeth. “Aw, you still care. Listen windbag, I’ve also got a few broken ribs and every word hurts. I need you to hack this Palm before this murdering sack of DNA waste opens his eyes.”
Aksel focused and pounded away with rapid-fire fingers on his computer equipment. Krystal, stomping her foot as blood seeped down her extremities, distracted herself by humming her favorite song. Having all the time in the world made certain moments drag on for an eternity.
Thirty seconds later, Aksel downloaded his incoming contact log. “Here is the list of contacts connected to him today.”
Krystal scanned the numbers with lightning speed, but she only needed to read one. The most recent one. “Well, just as I figured, my good old buddy Chris Gossler. Wow, am I SO not surprised. Get me a lock on his current location.”
Aksel spent a few more precious minutes. She didn’t blame him for not shifting to provide her the coordinates the moment she asked, all the shifting he had asked of his lightweight abilities had taxed him.
She reversed time, full speed, returning to the timeslice when she had tumbled. Still smothered in scratches and bleeding profusely, she used the adrenaline flowing through her body to fuel her timesense. Locking on the coordinates only two miles away, she dug her heals into the ground, and within captured time, sprinted across the roads at speeds intended to embarrass a Cheetah.
Instantaneously, but with the caloric burn of a two-mile impossible sprint, she locked on the limousine and positioned herself fifty feet in front of the moving vehicle.
She flipped on time with the eagerness of a ravenous lion.
The driver of the limo spotted her and slammed on the brakes. The vehicle skidded to a stop, only a few inches shy of breaking her bleeding legs. She stomped around the corner of the limo, jerked open the door, and peered inside, ready to rip the Commander limb from fat limb.
A large hazy outline of particulates greeted her with a smashed bullet proof window on the opposite side of his seat. The leather seat exposing a disappearing depression and still warm from his body.
Tamptan. Again. She would bet her favorite shoes on it.
The adrenaline wore off and exhaustion slammed into her, a crushing pile of bricks smashing her petite frame. She grabbed herself and wrapped her arms tight, the slick blood making her body slippery. She staggered backward, and fell hard to the sidewalk. Through snippets of visual signals still making it to her brain, she watched the limo speed away. She could taste metal in her mouth and the earth spun too fast. She rolled over on to her side, tapped Aksel’s digits and the world fell dark.
—————————-
Krystal attempted to roll over and moaned instead. Her eyes, twin shades, whipped open; she stared at the only person she cared about in this world. Aksel.
For a moment, her memory eluded her; in a flashflood it all returned. She stretched her chapped lips. Aksel held a cold towel against her forehead. A light sheet covered her as she lay in her underwear, her military garb nowhere to be found. She smiled at him, but then checked herself, and rewrote the accidental expression slip.
She gritted her teeth and pushed his wrist away. “I lost focus for a slice, and over-extended myself.”
Aksel tilted his head to the side. “I’ve never seen you lose control of a situation before.”
Krystal offered a half shrug with her right shoulder and a shiver ran down her body. She didn’t like appearing vulnerable in front of Aksel. She needed to reverse this timethread as soon as she had the strength.
Aksel seemed to read her mind. “I’ve got cold pizza.”
Krystal rose too quickly and the room spun. She grabbed a slice of pizza and wolfed it down as fast as she could. “Tell me you’ve got something more on Chris Gossler. That lying sack of excrement has got me sixty-nine shades of wound up and I can’t think straight.”
“Nothing. He’s clean as far as I can find.”
Krystal grumbled between overstuffed bites. “Well, he ain’t. You got me the intel, he authorized the missile strike on my ride, killing innocents just to get to me.”
“There is something.”
Krystal stopped, the fourth slice of pie hovering in her mouth by a shaking hand. “What?”
“My employee who hacked the connection for you. He said the simplicity of deciphering the encryption raised his suspicions. He’s encountered similar type of misdirection before. The Commander probably didn’t send the launch order, but whoever did, manipulated it to make it appear as such.”
She snagged another oversized bite, chewing with her mouth open. “They made it look like the Commander and then someone relocated his body again, not concerned about killing him. Their goal is framing me for his murder. Ah, all these stupid little pieces are slapping me dizzy! Nothing’s logical. The murder happy Sensor is always one timeslice ahead of me.”
Krystal stopped eating and talking for a second, too tired to slip into a timepause. She stared at Aksel’s handsome face and imagined her hand caressing his hair stubble on the side of his mouth and running her fingertips down his bicep. “It must be Tamptan. He’s the fly on the wall since the birthing of this timethread. When I rethreaded and saved the men on the airbus, he probably shifted and intercepted the Commander again to prevent me from discovering the truth. But, none of it clicks into place. The gaps in logic must be them acting in a hurry. The common thread is whoever is interfering won’t let me talk to the Commander.”
Aksel shrugged. “Which lends to the theory the Commander is clean and they are framing him.”
Krystal narrowed her eyes and ripped a bite out of her pizza. “I hate that fat bag of fabrication. If Tamptan did lie to him and claimed I didn’t pass the course when I did; if Tamptan planted the terrorist bomb he had another Sensor do it because he never shifted in my presence; if he snatched the Commander away both times before I could talk to him…”
Krystal trailed off and shoveled in the rest of the pizza.
Aksel stood and shifted to his wet bar. He grabbed a couple of energy drinks from the fridge and tossed them to her.
She gulped them down.
Krystal burped and wiped her mouth, accidently reopening a wound around one of her diamond tattoos. “No. I’ll take your point, the Commander may or may not be the main player in this little charade, but I don’t accept he’s clean.”
Aksel poured himself a glass of tequila. “What about the prostitute, Bright Glow?” Aksel wiped away his micro-expression smirk.
Aksel had zero awareness of third generation Sensors and Krystal’s ability to observe his every timethread shift.
Krystal flared her nostrils. “Oh, oh, Bright Glow huh? You’re drooling over the hottie aren’t you, don’t deny it.”
Aksel gulped. “What? No. I’m saying my intel…”
Krystal crushed her empty energy drink can in one quick snap. “Aksel, you never change, you don’t. All men are the same…”
Krystal watched as Aksel rewound time to hide his original statement. Instead of mentioning Bright Glow, he offered, “There must be another player.”
Krystal crushed time flat to percolate her plan.
The idea hit her hard. The simplest thread to an audience with the Commander vibrated at the core of her timesense: she must kill Tamptan.
And it was impossible to kill a Sensor.
But, she couldn’t postulate an alternative. He needed to die, for as long as he would stay dead.
She opened her eyes wide and reset her pivot point. The web of time curved across her timesense and she resumed the beginning of the original timethread. Back to the tryouts, back to the park, back to her thwarting the bomb attack.
Her energy waned. Scarfing down the pizza and energy drinks had been in the future and she couldn’t carry energy with her into the past, her new present, her pivot point.
She blackmailed the Commander. She irritated Tamptan. She arranged to follow him. By Tamptan’s reactions, she determined he hadn’t shifted into the current past from the attacked airbus timethread.
“I’ll catch up with you Tamptan.” She dammed time, shifted, and rethreaded in front of an automated food transit truck for Park Burger. She flipped open the timeflow, smashed the mechanical arm and snatched a large tray of bacon cheeseburgers from behind the sneeze shield. The elderly driver hollered at her as she sprinted away in real time, since she couldn’t move the organic burgers through space without compressing them into charcoal.
She reached the airbus a few seconds before the entourage of secret service boarded the craft. She sprinted in front of them, threw the burger bag into the passenger area and clamped time shut. The frozen group of men stared stupidly, but Krystal only focused on Tamptan’s robot countenance. Ridiculous behind the mirror glasses. She reached out with the invisible tentacles of her timesense and caressed his. No sign of him activating his timesense in her presence.
An idea struck her.
She removed his mirror glasses, a temperature free finger contact where the five human senses remained muted, a distant backburner to timesense. She followed her visual cues, her brain’s use of timesense to recreate the frozen photons of light energy to simulate the world. The backside of his glasses had a picture on it. He had his Palm integrated into the glasses and used the interface to hide what he accessed. She could totally use this.
She carefully repositioned his glasses, a disruption his finely tuned timesense would detect once she resumed normal timespeed. She hovered into the airbus and searched the stockpile of weapons packed into numerous compartments, disturbing the atoms and creating an outline of particulates. Her timesense located a brick of friction resistant C-4 with an installed remote microchip activator. That’s what she needed.
She opened the storage compartment above the seat Tamptan would soon occupy, shoved the C-4 under a first aid pack, shut the compartment and paused to calculate for an eternal moment. The temporary particulates she stirred up from the timepause movement would alert Tamptan if he boarded the ship too soon. She needed to distract him.
She somersaulted out of the airbus and planted her feet firmly in front of Tamptan; she unleashed the timeflow.
Tamptan hesitated as his timesense prevented him from bulldozing Krystal and groping her inappropriately. He flickered for a moment and adjusted his glasses with his ears and nose. Krystal slapped his chest hard. “Sorry, I paused time to crush your glasses, they do irritate me beyond reason. Then I figured, you will start sobbing like a little momma’s boy causing you to lose face in front of your minions.” She rubbed the edge of her eye with a rotating knuckle.
The secret service men pushed past Krystal and shoulder checked her, whispering insults under their breath.
Krystal twisted her hips sideways ninety degrees and extended her hand like a circus performer. “Lead the way, O Captain, my captain.”
Tamptan’s stone-face didn’t crack. With military precision, he marched up the steps of the airbus.
This timethread, Krystal didn’t sit next to him, but grabbed the burgers and sauntered to the opposite end of the airbus.
Tamptan’s mind now a trickling stream of memories arriving from the alternates of their simultaneous encounter.
Krystal texted Aksel with her Palm while shoving burgers in her mouth with the other. ‘I need you to hack into Tamptan’s Palm, program a flash bomb to ignite from the visual feed in his sunglasses, and then coordinate with the activation of a microchip imbedded within C-4 in his proximity. Here is the exact time needed, down to a hundredth of a second.’
Aksel texted, ‘Are you joking?’
Krystal slammed the holographic keys in her Palm with her rapid-fire fingers. ‘Do I sound like I’m joking?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t hear you.’
‘I’m not joking!’
‘I don’t think I can…’
‘I didn’t tell you to think, Aksel, just do. Do it. Now.’
‘…’
‘….’
After she gulped the last bite of burger down her throat, she exhaled hard on the soldier sitting next to her. He pulled away and waived the odor out of his face. “What big boy? Surprised I can handle that much meat?”
Aksel texted, ‘Super fast work, no guarantees, had my guy rush through a bunch of firewalls, not sure…’
Krystal didn’t finish reading, just finger quipped, ‘Thanks!’
Krystal squeezed her eyes shut and counted down the seconds backward, her timesense coordinating with her perfect recall replaying the memory of the previous timethread.
The precise moment hit the present hard. The flash from his eyeglasses and the C-4 exploded simultaneously. Krystal shifted and scrubbed away time, rushing at Tamptan.
He moved too fast.
He rewound time and the fight erupted.
Krystal anticipated him reversing time and resetting the entire timethread, unraveling the current reality in front of her and adjusting it to an alternate of his creation. But, as typical of men, his delusions included beating her at her own game.
He rethreaded a few seconds, ripped open the compartment as he removed his glasses, and pulled the microchip from the C-4, rendering it harmless. He forced out a held breath; it escaped his lungs, a burst of nuclear energy contained within a black hole of secrets. Krystal failed to kill him and his timesense vibrated with the intensity of a star.
Krystal unzipped time and the two of them intertwined, engaged in timethread warfare.
She grabbed one of the soldier’s weapon and pointed it at Tamptan’s temple; he rethreaded a second backward and snatched the gun before she could fire it. He wrapped his arm around her neck to snap it, she shifted and flipped his body, aiming to break his spine on the floor of the cabin.
As split seconds ticked by, the soldiers maneuvered in slow motion, the battle raging during the hyper-speed of rethreaded time. Tamptan, his face no longer a stoic painting, gritted his teeth as the two of them continued to rethread time, blocking hand maneuvers, shoving, grabbing, shifting, misfiring weapons, deflecting, wrestling.
Krystal detected his pattern. He favored shifting to her right with a two second rewrite.
She unraveled his pattern without effort.
And she had joined the DHP to learn how to fight these jokers.
She initiated the maneuver he repeatedly countered with a two second rethread and dodge to her right.
She timed it, swayed her hips, shifted, held the butt of the gun at his point of his reentering the timethread, swung with all the strength of her right arm, and let go of time with a gasp of breath.
Contact!
Too slow; his timesense, lazy to the shift in trajectory, faltered. In rapid motion, a blur of beauty and carnage, she beat both sides of his temples with the butt of two guns.
It worked.
He fell unconscious.
She screamed with manic frenzy.
As time flowed the mob of angry soldiers advanced with military precision. She snapped time shut and absorbed the info on the frozen digital clock in the cockpit. Twenty-two seconds. She couldn’t risk Tamptan waking. She stepped around the frozen men, removed all their weapons, unconcerned about causing damage to their hands from the release of potential energy, since they would be dead soon enough. Within the timelock, she opened the compartment with the utility kit, found the anesthetic. She lifted her weapon, pushed the timeflow and pointed her gun at the men. They all screamed from the heat of their hands that had been adjusted during the timepause. With the commandeered gun holding steady, she removed the anesthetic, approached Tamptan’s unconscious body, and injected two shots directly into his bruised temples.
The secret service men screamed obscenities at her as she waived her weapon back and forth, with uncanny speed, shifting with murderous intent to intimidate them. Their anger didn’t dissolve into foolishness. They couldn’t move faster than a Sensor.
Tamptan had even moved too slow.
Over the intercom, the pilot of the airbus cried out, “We have a problem. Incoming missile and our countermeasures are jammed.”
Krystal shifted her weapon back and forth, calling out to the pilot behind her, “Evasive maneuvers?” She shrugged and grinned sheepishly.
Don’t you wake, Tamptan!
The airbus creaked under the sudden thrust of altitude and trajectory change. She waited to the last possible nanosecond, paused time, shifted to the door, let a small drip of time move forward and cranked open the door handle. The airbus, now ninety degrees rotated, traveled downward and to the right. The open door, now directly above the ground. She thrust time shut, pushed her body through the threshold, and swam through the air like an intoxicated shark. After she moved her body far enough from the blast, she unbolted time, and gravity kicked in to pull her down into freefall. The missile hit the airbus in the bottom middle, directly below the center of gravity where the fuel tank resided. The airbus exploded and the shockwave smacked Krystal full force against her body. She grasped onto her timesense, shifted further away from the blast, and paused again, hovering in the air.
Tamptan, you metallic cockroach; you’d better be dead this timethread.
Krystal, fueled by the burgers and defeat over Tamptan, refocused her energy, and plunged to the Earth, a human bullet. She lasered with pinpoint accuracy the location of the Commander and let her timesense guide her to the limousine. As she approached the ground, she used her timesense to slow her speed. No need to go tumbling through the rocks this time, she didn’t need to use her momentum to crush anyone.
She dropped to the ground, realigned the trajectory or her timesense, and reentered the timeflow.
All the readjustments shoved her into the ground; she slammed her right hand into the pavement and steadied herself. Intense caloric burn, but no blood loss or near pass out exhaustion.
The limo approached. This timethread, with plenty of distance to spare, the limo slowed down and maneuvered alongside her. The limo’s window tint dissolved. The Commander waived her in.
She jumped inside, sitting next to him, unsure of reality. No Sensor grab, no trail of ghost particulates. Just the fat guy, still in the same uniform, smoking a cigar.
Krystal shut the door and the limo resumed traveling down the road as the windows blackened.
The Commander growled, after a long puff. “You’re quick. Twenty minutes.”
Krystal snorted. “From your perspective.”
The Commander waived his cigar around. “No Tamptan interference, which means you successfully neutralized him.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s hard to interfere when you’re dead.”
The Commander raised an eyebrow. “You killed him? I thought you couldn’t kill Sensors.”
“He won’t stay dead. He probably fabricated a stockpile of contingency plans. As soon as one of his informants discover he is dead, they will rethread into the past and warn him to avoid the danger. I carved us out a short timeslice. In a few minutes, maybe an hour, he will get a message during this past; then we hit a different timethread. If not, I’ll reverse and fix it. His service men don’t deserve death. I seldom keep my Code violations permanent.”
The Commander held his belly with his left hand and puffed on the Cigar. The ventilation system pulled the smoke away from Krystal’s face. He mused, “Tamptan is a good man.”
Krystal grunted. “What? I just spent a ridiculous amount of time and energy getting that last century hipster out of my face!” She glanced away to avoid the Commander’s grotesque physic, but peered only at a darkened window.
“Not his fault. It’s his directive. He is not only my bodyguard, but guard’s my secrets, he is the best Tracker.” He jammed his pinky finger into his temple. “The access I have to future history would make your head spin. The government doesn’t want the wrong Sensor to know what I know. If I’m compromised, Tamptan must take me out or remove me.”
Krystal pursed her lips. “Yes, he’s killed you a couple of times to avoid this conversation.”
“As he should.”
The puzzle pieces rained down into her brain, an elaborate dance orchestrated to ensure she and the elephant pile of secrets could share a conversation. Krystal grunted, kicked her feet onto the opposite chair facing her and batted her eyes at the Commander. “Okay. You’ve manipulated me and conned me into this little meeting. I figure you could’ve just slipped me a note, but whateves. What’s more important than global warming you gotta tell me. And if this is a desperate plea for me to be your next Bright Glow, I swear I’m gonna cut you old man.”
The Commander dropped a quick nod. “You know about her. You understand the sensitivity of this intel.”
“Nope. Only info I’m aware of is she is your little night nympho and she may or may not be a spy.”
“She’s a spy. But prostitution is her cover. I’m too old to worry about being pleased by women.”
Too fat, you mean. Whateves.
The Commander continued, “She works for me. She focused on steering you in the right direction.”
Krystal cocked her head to the side. “Steer me? She isn’t a Sensor.”
The Commander reached into his shirt pocket. Krystal tensed for a split second, following his hands closely. He pulled an electronic business card out of his pocket and handed it out to her. He blew out another puff of smoke. “Do you know who this is?”
She grabbed the card and rubbed her finger across the center. She frowned at the raised image of a Mayan Calendar, encircled by a grotesque snake with a human head, eating its own tail. The body of the snake, partially snake, partially human, didn’t activate any memories inside her perfect recall. At the bottom right of the e-card two inscribed initials burned bright, N.B. “Who is this whack job?”
The Commander waived his hand, and a small compartment opened. He fumbled at the rocks glass of whiskey. “Want a drink?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not here to socialize, fat cat. Just give me what I need, and I’ll move on. I guess someone neglected to tell you, with modern tech, they could take care of your extra hundred pounds. Unless your personal goal is to die from cardiac arrest.”
The Commander pointed his cigar at his chest. “Mechanical heart. My doctor replaced it twenty years ago with a titanium nuclear core, enveloped with synthetic and genetically engineered horse DNA. This heart will outlive me by a hundred years.”
Krystal grunted. “Heartless. Yeah, I’m surprised.”
The Commander, unlike earlier, didn’t act phased by her disrespect. He downed a gulp of whiskey. “I’ve pissed off the most dangerous Sensor we know about. We don’t know his name, or who he is. He managed to rewrite history beyond counting and we can’t figure out who he is. But, this is his calling card. He indulges some sort of obsession with the Mayan snake god, Kulkulkan. There seems to be a connection between his beliefs and actions and the Priesthood. But, the Priesthood is obsessed with upholding the Timesensor Code of principles, whereas this guy does just the opposite. He is the one trying to kill me. But, for some reason he doesn’t want to do it on the sly. He’s trying to make a statement.”
Krystal pursed her lips and shook the business card like an old-fashioned polaroid. “He’s the one who planted the bomb. Quick and I can’t track his timesense. But, I watched the bomb explode, it didn’t kill you. Just ripped everyone a few new holes.”
The Commander peered at her for a moment and then narrowed his eyes. “Well, you missed a detail.” He reached into the same pocket, pulled out a piece of metal, and dropped it into Krystal’s right hand.
She lifted it. It appeared to her like a drill bit, but short like a screw, and heavy.
The Commander pointed at it. “It’s magnetic. He maneuvered the explosion to take out my mechanical heart. These are designed to drill through me.”
Krystal tossed the drill bit onto the floor of the limo. “Fine. Why is this obsessed Sensor aiming at you?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I’m assuming because of my having a direct line from the future. We’ve been filtering future history backward through time; the Sensors who work with us can keep track of the proper timethread. The Attorney General chose you for several reasons, one of them being your relationship with Aksel Electus.”
Krystal coughed, then rewound and maintained her cool. Casually, she inquired, “Aksel? What’s he got to do with anything?”
“Basically. Everything. He’s the future. His lineage keeps the world on track. We’ve determined this mystery bomber succeeded in completely altered Aksel’s timethread. The person he is today is not the person he used to be. Without his lineage, the Earth’s future is completely derailed. The Attorney General, she specifically pointed you as being the right person for the job. We want you to protect him.”
Krystal snorted. “Ironic.”
The Commander puffed his cigar, waiting.
Krystal rewrote her reaction. It’s ironic, mused Krystal, because I’ve reset my pivot point thirty years into the past over a promise I made to him in the future. I’m already protecting him. It’s a secret I’ve kept hidden from every living soul. It’s ironic that you are requesting me to do the exact thing I’m already doing…
Krystal unscrewed time. “Listen old man, I broke up with that foolio last week. He’s a blip on the radar, just a passing pleasure man. He’s tall and handsome, but I’m not interested in marrying the boy toy; don’t waste ink rewriting your history books.”
The Commander finished his whiskey. “No, you don’t marry him. You don’t need to date him. Just keep your special eye on him. There are only a handful of us who understand how the third generation timesense works. You can track the changes. Your memory won’t be affected by Kulkulkan’s alterations.”
Krystal growled. The last few puzzle pieces falling into place against her will. She pointed an accusatory forefinger. “The obstacle course, meaningless. Our secret dialogue, the real test. But, I still don’t follow Tamptan. He kept interfering. You should’ve told robot chicken to stay out of my way.”
The Commander paused, as if losing an internal struggle. He waived his cigar and threw his gut in her direction. “Tamptan is a good man. But, he is compromised. Kulkulkan holds Tamptan by his throat. He threatens to erase family members Tamptan cares about. And because Tamptan inherited the third-gen sight, he can’t live with the memory of losing members of his family. Kulkulkan conceals his identity and flouts the Timesensor Code. Tamptan doesn’t admit I’m aware of his dual directives.”
Krystal sucked air through her teeth. “Then who launched the rocket at Tamptan? If this Caca-kulkan creeper is in cahoots with Tamptan, then who?”
The Commander tapped his Palm and showed Krystal the display. “Bright Glow, her Russian undercover code name, is working with me. I gave her directives to interfere with Tamptan’s surveillance and steer you to meet with me, by any means necessary.”
Krystal snapped her fingers. “That’s why she allowed me to follow her to your house. Ridiculous. Elaborate theatrics. This Kulkulkan is aware of exactly what you’re telling me.”
The Commander refilled his glass of whiskey and took another deep swig. “Hope not. Then operation Tornado will lose all momentum.”
Krystal sighed and licked her lips. “I’m tornado.”
The Commander shrugged. “A shorter code than Tasmanian Devil.” He almost smirked.
Krystal lifted her left eyebrow. “To summarize, my mission is to protect Aksel from triple K guy and figure out his real identity, allowing the DHP to protect themselves, and preventing you from getting killed.”
The Commander sucked on his cigar, deeply. “You got it, kid. You can report to Bright Glow. One of the things we figured out about Kulkulkan, he seldom wastes time on regular humans. The only reason he is targeting me is because he found out I’m the one tasked to receive future history. And I learned about what he did to Aksel. I’m not in danger of being erased from existence by him for reasons I cannot divulge to you. But, he aims to kill me, publicly, in the present.”
Krystal slammed her hands against the darkened window separating them from the driver. “Stop the car, Hokey.”
The Commander pointed his cigar at her. “Where are you going? You’ve heard enough?”
The limo slowed down and stopped. Krystal whipped open the door and hopped out. She leaned her head in and batted her eyelashes with calculated frenzy. “Listen, fat slob. I’m aware you eat delusions of grandeur for breakfast and pray mission Tornado is gonna save your hide. But, honestly, you’re a worthless pile of bloated flesh, and if this Kulkulkan character decides you should be melted whale blubber then who am I to stop him.”
All the color in the Commander’s face disappeared. “What!” He roared. “The Attorney General…”
Krystal lifted a finger and shook it at him. “Sorry pal. Guess I failed your mission. My bad. Enjoy your short happy life, Macomber.”
She giggled, covered her mouth, dropped the school girl act and growled, “Tornado out!”
She opened her eyes wide and reset her pivot point. The web of time curved through the infinite lens of her timesense and she slipped once again into the beginning of the original timethread. Back to the tryouts, back to the park, back to her thwarting the bomb attack.
Then she rewound time. She rebooted her original arrival to the tryouts thirty minutes earlier. She lifted her pantleg and removed a friction resistant laser burner. She carved a message into the tree, inches away from where Kulkulkan would place the knapsack bomb in the close future. She carved N.B. HEARTS A.E.
Since she had already lived through the timethread multiple times, she fast forwarded through repeated history to the point where Kulkulkan would plant the bomb.
The bomb didn’t appear.
The Commander shouted, “You listen here, you disrespectful young lady, we have put up with your nonsense for months, against our better judgement, and only as a FAVOR to the Attorney General. You have done nothing but disrupt our operations, play cruel pranks, dismiss our rules and treat our entire division with contempt. You’re done, you hear me! You cheated, that is what our third-gen Sensor, Tamptan Ellis said you did, and I believe him. This hearing is over!”
Krystal stood and flung the peace sign. “Later, sacks of fat cells.”
The Commander stopped scowling, a curtain of confusion, crawling across his face.
Krystal stopped time, ripped off her military garb to expose her daywear leather bikini attached to a sheer mesh material conforming to the diamond studded skin of her body which left nothing to the imagination. She ripped off her boots and wiggled her toes into her super light thin-skin sandals. She kicked time forward.
As she swung her hips away from the puzzled panel of pathetic men, she flung a seductive glance in Tamptan’s direction.
Out of character, he shifted, and his robot stance stopped her spectacular parade. She used her timesense to realign herself and not slam directly into his chest.
Tamptan lifted his mirror sunglasses off his nose, placed them in his pocket and smiled.
His smile, natural and human, unnerved her. She gulped. No point in rewriting her micro-expression of surprise, since he would observe all her rewrites. She grunted. “You still got some tricks hiding in your underwear, Tampon?”
Tamptan lifted his Palm to face her, a gesture implying a desire to exchange contact information for hookup purposes.
Krystal’s eyebrows vibrated. “Oh, oh, there now, big boy, you are seriously glitching. Your Frankenstein bolts need some electric shock.”
Tamptan, bold and ever sure of himself, lowered his head to improve eye-contact. “Listen. I know a special woman when I see one.”
Krystal snorted. She didn’t bother rewriting her exasperated expression. She lifted herself, stood on her tiptoes and shoved her hand against his forehead. “Let me guess. You failed to shift from the future timethread and missed the part where I killed you.”
For a brief timeslice, quick, and because Krystal stood a few inches from his face, she witnessed his eyes flash. Anyone else watching from another angle nearby couldn’t have possibly detected it.
And the final puzzle piece slapped her across the face. Tamptan had been playing both sides the entire time. Tamptan had been acting at the mercy of Kulkulkan, his every move a possible target, veiling any appearance at helping Krystal. He fought to lose, but crafted his failure into something resembling reality. Tamptan allowed Krystal to temporarily kill him.
Hmm. Maybe a DHP agent could teach her a few things, after all.
The connections flooded across her mind with a quick realization, and concerned Kulkulkan might be watching her, she morphed her surprise into flirtation, careful not to rethread her micro-expression. “Tampon, give it a royal rest. You could reboot our interaction a thousand times, and I could never get over those retro-shadicles. Deal breaker, bro. DEAL…BREAKER.” Snapping clean from eye contact before either one of them could give away the unspoken communication, she flipped around on her tiptoes and aimed to shake her butt as hard as she could at him.
“You might want to put some clothes on, it’s going to be a cold one today.”
Tamptan mentioned the weather, universal Sensor code for entering a consensual timepause. But, if Kulkulkan stalked from the shadows, he might discover Tamptan’s duplicity. Krystal wouldn’t risk exposing Tamptan; she ignored him and continued swinging her hips in the opposite direction. She pushed her timesense out, searching with her tendrils for any evidence of another Sensor within her vicinity. She detected nothing.
She stepped forward to the automated Park Burger truck and waived at the elderly man reading from his Palm. He swiveled in her direction and almost glanced away, but his eyes captured her lack of outfit and indulged a second peek. Krystal jammed her finger at the ready-made burgers. “Gimme those six, and those four over there.”
The Park Burger employee leaned backward and glanced at the row of burgers. “You want ten?”
Krystal smacked her lips. “To start. Make sure you don’t give me those two right in the middle, they are overcooked.”
The elderly man pushed the button to activate the robotic arm. “How do you know they are overcooked?”
“Because I already ate them once before.”
Seated at a raised stool that emerged from beneath the engineered grass when she had approached, she slammed the paper tray of burgers on her lap and started devouring them. Her fingers danced across the holographic numbers and a raised image of Aksel Electus in full depth display snapped into focus over her hand. Aksel peered up from his desk, eyebrows raised. “Why are you contacting me?”
Krystal rolled her eyes. “Always with the questions, Ax. How about a ‘good to see you, you hot irresistible thing you.”
Aksel dropped his feet off his desk to the floor and leaned into the connection. “Are you kidding me right now? You broke up with me last week and told me to never contact you again! Same question; why are you contacting me?”
Krystal grinned, bits of grease and gristle glistening from her teeth. “Because I missed you, you stupid, stupid man.”
Aksel rubbed his forehead and blinked multiple times.
Krystal ripped off another bite of burger and spoke with her mouth full. “Listen. Stop gestating questions. Order the pizza you’re drooling over and eat lunch with me right now.”
Aksel swallowed his argument. He tapped his Palm and peered through the connection at her, his eyes twin saucers.
Krystal glanced at the trees, listened to the chirping of birds, the buzzing of bees, and smiled at the floating clouds. She peered through the spring air and admired Aksel’s projected face. “Listen, bro. What if I told you, you were the most important person in the world?”
Aksel frowned. “Why am I so important?”
Krystal groaned. “No. No questions. Make something up…let’s say you invent the cure for cancer. How would you feel about it?”
Aksel stared at Krystal, rewriting his unconscious glances at her scandalous outfit. She didn’t care, she liked it when he ogled her. This alternate timethread wouldn’t last forever, and she cherished their short intersection together. Aksel shook his head. “What does it matter? I mean, if I cured cancer, that would be awesome. But, that wouldn’t make me the most important person in the world. Everyone works together, no one can do it alone, life is a team effort. No one person is THAT important.”
Krystal’s chest heaved as she stuffed another burger in her mouth.
She lacked the energy and desire to convince him. And it didn’t matter. She would protect him from Kulkulkan. She would figure out how he had manipulated Aksel’s timethread, had taken away his third-gen sight, and she would maneuver him back to the timethread where he matured into the most important man of the future.
She would do this.
It was simply a matter of time.
The End