Redemption: Supernatural Time-Traveling Romance with Sci-fi and Metaphysics (26 page)

Ann considered this, and couldn’t
remember the last time she was ever really quiet or still. “Interesting,” she
said. “I’ll have to give that a shot sometime.”

“Not right now though,” said Rob,
his face fading from the screen. “You have a call.”

“Ann!” It was Tomo. “What are you
doing at the moment?”

“Just going shopping,” said Ann,
pointing to the supermarket, despite the fact Tomo couldn’t see it from the
camera.

“I need to see you. Come and meet
me at Café Sky.”

Ann was taken aback slightly by
the urgency in his voice. “What, now?”

“Yes, now. I’ll be there in
fifteen minutes.”

“But I’m
—
” she
began, but the screen went blank. Tomo had gone.

What on earth could be wrong with Tomo?
Ann thought to herself as she pulled her car up at the sidewalk
and headed towards the Café Sky.
Has
something happened to him? Has he been fired? That would be terrible news,
indeed, after the amazing work he’s done on the 3D imaging for the E-A device.
Something strange certainly seemed to be going on.

She pushed open the café door and
her eyes took a moment to adjust to the subdued lighting inside. Above her, the
café’s domed roof was emblazoned with a panorama of the night sky. Stars
twinkled in familiar patterns and, in the center, a full moon glowed with cold,
white light. Even as Ann watched it, the display began to change as the black
sheet of night shifted through shades of blue, dark to light, until it reached the
blue of a summer day, the stars replaced by small, fluffy clouds, the moon by
the fierce face of the sun.

A movement across the café caught
her eye and Ann dropped her gaze to see Tomo waving at her. He was dressed in a
three-piece suit, sharp and black. A smart tie emerged from beneath the
starched, white collar of his shirt and he had a black fedora perched on his
head that cast a shadow across his eyes. Somehow, all these odd items of
clothing suited him very well and Ann once again considered how attractive Tomo
was. But the whole effect was pretty bizarre, the sort that Ann had rarely ever
seen outside of an old photograph.

“What’s this, a fancy dress
party?” she said, walking up to his table. “Even lawyers stopped wearing ties
years ago. And as for that weird hat… did you join an amateur dramatics group
or something?”

Tomo looked completely unfazed by
her playful sarcasm and leaned back in his chair smiling at her as though he
didn’t have a care in the world.

“Or something,” he said with an
easy smile. “I like to dress appropriately for the occasion, and today is a
very special day! Please sit down.”

Ann took the other seat at the
table and looked at him over interlaced fingers. “So what’s the big rush?”

“This!” said Tomo, placing what
looked to Ann like a slim version of Linda’s E-Panel on the table.

“Okay.” Ann frowned, unsure what
to make of it. “So what?”

In answer to her question, a
hologram appeared in the air between them. It was a head and, to Ann’s
amazement, she realized it was Rob. It smiled at her and it looked so real that
she found herself pushing her chair back slightly, finding the head a little
creepy.

She peered around it to look at
Tomo. “This is… incredible! Is this a hologram version of the E-Assistant? You
kept this quiet.”

“I wanted to wait until it was
just right,” he said, his eyes twinkling with excitement. “I was thinking this
would make a nice upgrade to the thing. Watch this.” He tapped the device on
the table and Ann stared in wonder as Rob’s head bobbed off across the
restaurant, peeping behind the counter where the barista was busy making
coffee, then zooming behind a plant before swinging back to hover over the
table again.

“It’s not tethered to the device,”
Tomo explained. “In fact, it can move up to a hundred meters from it in any
direction.”

“Really?” She laughed as she
thought of Rob’s head bursting through the wall of a dark alley and scaring the
people walking along it. “We would have to change the terms and conditions for
our users!”

Tomo tapped the device again and
the head vanished. “So you like it then?”

“Tomo, I love it!” said Ann, the
fascination clear on her face. “You’re fantastic.”

“Thank you. You’re pretty amazing
yourself!” he said and leant forward to stare into her eyes. “So, have I made
you happy?”

Ann considered this. She was
certainly excited about what this meant for the E-A device and proud of Tomo’s
work. But, happy? Her thoughts turned again to Michael
—
to his
attentive eyes, his light hair, his gentle touch. She sighed.

“I’m proud of you, Tomo. This is
going to be great for our business.”

“I reckon so,” he said, slipping
the device back into his bag and taking out something, which Ann couldn’t quite
make out. “Though it’s only a prototype at the moment. It hasn’t gone through
beta testing yet.”

“But all the same, it’s years
ahead of any of our competitors. It was certainly worth rushing here for!”

“But it’s not the only reason I
asked you to see me, Ann.” He gave her a mysterious look as he opened his hands
to reveal a small pretty box, placing it carefully on the table and sliding it
towards Ann. “I wanted to give you something else as well.”

“What’s in here?” she asked with
a smile, picking it up. “Another floating head? A real genie, maybe?” Inside
there was a gorgeous ring on which was set a heart-shaped pink ruby encrusted
with small diamonds.
Wow, s
he
thought.
It’s gorgeous! It reminds me of
the gift from King Louis, and it’s probably worth just as much! It doesn’t have
a portrait hidden inside though.
Ann tore her eyes off it to look back at
Tomo. “What is this?”

“A ring,” he said, the mysterious
look still on his face. Ann felt a blush creeping up her face and was glad to
see that the café ceiling was now displaying a sunset, bathing everything in
its deep, red glow. Somehow, Tomo still managed to look cool, even nonchalant,
as though they were discussing nothing more than the weather or what they each
had for dinner the previous evening.

Ann took a deep breath, pulling
herself together, a small frown creasing her forehead. “Yes, I know it’s a
ring…”

Tomo leaned forward again, his
eyes gazing intensely into hers. “It’s an engagement ring.”

“Wow!” She raised her eyebrows in
surprise, sitting further back in her chair. “And it’s a beautiful one. Who’s
the lucky girl?”

“That would be you, Ann.”

Ann blinked, stunned for a moment,
unable to take it in. “Me? But…” She looked at the ring again. It was so
elegant and looked exactly her size, and the temptation to put it on her finger
was almost overwhelming.
Maybe Nina was
right,
she thought.
Maybe my haunting
dreams
are
just a side effect of
loneliness. And Tomo is a great guy, a genius in his field. It would be so
simple to just put the ring on, dissolve in the warmth of Tomo’s hand and
forget all about this spiritual stuff. That would be nice, like when I’m with
Michael… Michael! If I choose Tomo, how can I be with Michael? What was Rob
saying about making choices? We have to make a right choice in order not to be
robotic?’

“Try it on, Ann.” Tomo’s voice
snapped her out of her contemplation.

Watching the ruby heart
glistening in the rays of the rising sun, Ann was anxiously thinking.
And how about my own heart? Isn’t it
fulfilled by love with Michael? Can I accept Tomo, and just throw away my
feelings for Michael? No! So long as I have a gleam of hope, even at the
expense of my terrible loneliness, I will wait for Michael’s love.

“No,” said Ann decidedly, looking
straight into Tomo’s astonished eyes. “No.”

Her colleague’s face fell and Ann
realized she had never seen him looking sad before. She reached out and placed
a hand gently on his.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as he met
her eyes again. “I can’t. But thank you. Thank you for everything, Tomo.” And
with that she stood up and left the cafe.

~

Back in her car, Ann found all
those unhelpful thoughts flooding back, cluttering up her mind and filling her
with anxiety.
What do I do?
She
wondered as she buried her head in her hands.
How has everything gotten so complicated? If only things were clearer
with Michael, but I don’t know what his real intentions are.

“What should I do?” she said
aloud.

“Well, there’s still the shopping
to do,” said Rob helpfully, appearing as normal on the screen of the E-A
device.

“Forget the shopping, Rob!” said
Ann, sitting up as she made her decision. “We’re going back to the psychic’s
house!”

Smolensk, Russia. July 1942

Chapter Twenty-Four

S
he bursts awake as an explosion rips through a nearby building.
She’s enveloped in a cloud of dust and a shower of stone. Coughing, she brushes
the dirt off her clothes and looks around the narrow trench. Close by, a young
woman rocks back and forth on her heels, her arms wrapped around her knees.

“Katya!” she shouts, shaking the
woman by the shoulder. “Katya! Are you okay?”

Katya looks up, her face confused
for a moment. She tries to focus. “They told us the Germans wouldn’t come here
today,” she says at last. “They told us! Why are they here, Lena? Why are they
attacking us today?
We aren’t prepared at all!”

“I don’t know. I guess. . .”
She pauses as another shell lands a street away, tearing through walls and
shaking the ground. As the echoes die away she shakes more dust and earth from
her hair and tries not to listen to the screams of the injured. “I guess the
Germans changed their mind. They are ruled by a madman, after all, and
unpredictability is his main weapon.”

“We have to get a radio
transceiver,” says Katya. “We need to contact command about the attack.”

Lena helps Katya to her feet and
together they peer over the edge of the trench. “The transceiver should be in
there,” she says, pointing to a canopy around a hundred meters away. “That’s
where it’s supposed to be kept. Come on!”

Together they scramble out of the
trench, dirt and blood staining their uniforms. To the right, the ground is
littered with the dead and dying, victims of the bombing that hammered those
nearby with a lethal blast of bricks and splintered wood. Scrabbling over the
rubble they head towards the canopy. Katya slips and catches hold of an arm
only to find out there is no body attached to it, and Elena stumbles across a
young girl lying on half a door, her face spattered with blood, her breathing
quick and shallow.

“Hey, you!” calls Elena, catching
sight of a nurse huddling behind a nearby wall. “Get over here and help this
girl. She’s wounded, damn it!”

Eventually she and Katya reach
the canopy where a small trestle table has been set up. On it there sits a
radio transceiver.

“Here it is!” she says, hurrying
over to it. Katya joins her and throws the switch to power it up. There is
nothing. No sound comes from the radio, not even the faintest crackle of
static. Nothing.

“I can’t get it to work!” says
Katya with disappointment, her voice close to panic. Elena heaves up the radio
and shakes it.

“Fuck!” she says at the sound of
broken glass rattling inside the machine. I don’t believe it!” She never used
to utter such filthy curses back at home, before this terrible conflict
started. Her parents would never have allowed it. But she has been using
increasingly worse language in recent months, both in Russian
and
English, as long as no one else is
around, since it would be dangerous to reveal knowledge of her native language.
The words have power. They may not be polite, but they help, and war is no
place for civility or genteel maidens, just as it is evidently no place for
glass tubes! “This is so bloody typical of the equipment we get dumped with. No
wonder the Germans are trampling all over us.” She curses again, under her
breath, furious with the Soviet leadership and their cavalier attitude toward
their troops.

A young sergeant, barely old
enough to shave, hurries into the canopy. When he catches sight of Elena, he
stops and salutes.

Oh hell,
she thinks, looking at his
smooth features.
What is this kid?
Sixteen? Seventeen? We’re trying fight off the Germans with children and broken
glass.
Another shell strikes, this time only fifteen meters down the
street, showering the canopy in stones and dust. They duck for cover, but the
canopy holds and the next shell hits several blocks away.

“It’s busted!” says the sergeant,
pointing at the radio.

“Yes, I’m well aware of that,”
Elena replies, the anger evident in her voice. “The bloody tubes have blown.
Why wasn’t this equipment checked and serviced?”

He shrugs and gestures to the
carnage around them. “It’s the bombing. The glass bulbs can’t take the shock.
It’s the same with the spares. There’s not a single one here intact.”

“What are we going to do?” asks
Katya frantically. “We have to get to a radio! We have to inform command.”

“There is another radio,” says
the sergeant. “Without glass tubes.”

Elena looks around at the empty
area. “Where the hell is it, then?”

“One kilometer from here, give or
take.” He turns to point across the city. “That way.”

As she turns to see the direction
he is indicating, she catches sight of another young soldier running across the
square towards the canopy. Just then, the ground shakes as a bomb rips apart a
building to the left, spewing rubble across the square. What appears to be an
iron bathtub rockets through the air, striking the runner in the shoulder and
knocking him to the ground. Blood pumps from where his head and
 
arm used to be. Elena stares in horror.
This is a nightmare! Can we possibly survive
a thousand-meter-long dash across the city?
Looking back at the broken
radio she realizes there is no other option.
We have to try!

As if to confirm her decision,
the German artillery shifts its focus and the sound of the bombs grows distant.

She turns to the sergeant. “How
long do you reckon we’ve got before they start shelling us again?”

“Who knows?” he says with a
shrug. “Who can predict what these bastards are going to do next?”

“And who knows when we’ll get a
better chance than this?” She stops a moment, listening to the sounds of
destruction moving steadily away from their position. “Okay,” she says. “We’re
going to risk it and try to get to that radio. Will you help us, sergeant?” It
is not so much a request as a command and he follows her and Katya out of the
canopy without a word, ducking as they embark on the terrifyingly long kilometer
towards their goal.

Fifteen streets separate them
from the radio station and each one is littered with rubble, with the dying and
the dead. In one of them, Elena sees a small girl, barely two years old,
sitting on the steps of a house, crying loudly as she grips the blood-spattered
arm of her dead mother. In another, a wall lies across the thoroughfare and, as
she and her companions clamber over it, she notices a single leg sticking out
from beneath the broken brickwork. As they scurry through the city, their
progress is marked by the constant rhythm of the German artillery, sometimes in
a distant street, sometimes much closer.

Dear Lord, s
he thinks, as the windows
of a nearby building are blown out, showering the trio with splinters of glass.
Please, dear Lord, save and protect us!

And then she sees it, only thirty
meters away
—
the bunker that houses the radio. They have made it!

“Leave them!” she shouts, as she
turns to see Katya heading towards a group of school children standing around a
body, their teacher maybe. “There’s no time! Come on!”

With a reluctant glance at the
children, Katya hurries back to follow Elena down into the bunker. At one end
the earth wall has fallen in and three bodies lay nearby, bloody and broken.

“Over there!” says the sergeant,
pointing with one hand while the other is pressed against a gash in his cheek
to stem the flow of blood. “The radio. Do you know how to use it?”

Elena frowns at him. “Of course
we do!”

“Thank you, God!” says Katya,
pulling out the radio and opening the metal cover. “It’s not been damaged.”

Elena joins her, making sure not
to step on the bodies, and snatches up the headphones. She pushes in the jack
and flicks the power switch, which immediately fills her ears with the crackle
and hiss of the radio.
Who would have
thought it?
She thinks to herself as she begins to turn the dials.
I’ve never been so pleased to hear the sound
of static! Now to put all that training to use.
Eventually, she finds the
frequency she is looking for and leans down to the microphone.

“Come in, Eagle,” she says,
shouting over the sound of the battle. “Come in, Eagle. This is Lynx. Do you
read me? Over.”

The sergeant joins the two women,
leaning close to Elena to try and hear the response. She brushes him away and
presses the headphones to her ears.
Why
aren’t they replying?
Why don’t they
—

Suddenly, barely audible above
the static and the shells, a voice answers her call. It is not clear and Elena
can only pick out the words “Eagle” and “Go ahead”, but she knows she has made
contact with the command center.

“Eagle, this is Lynx,” she
repeats. “Smolensk is under fire from the south. Repeat, Smolensk is taking
fire. Need
—
” But whatever she is about to request is cut off as a shell
strikes nearby, blasting the roof from the bunker with a deafening explosion.
Elena is sent flying across the bunker, landing heavily across the bodies of
the men already lying there. She ends up on her back, the breath knocked out of
her, blinking dust and earth out of her eyes as she gazes upwards into the
haze. As she does so, trying to catch her breath, she sees a patch of sky
appear through the smoke and dust. It is a calm, clear blue. Here and there
small, white clouds float serenely, indifferent to the carnage below, which
reminds her of the sky over her homeland in Arizona, so far away. She smiles at
the thought as the darkness washes over her.

~

She was only twenty-two when the
war began, fresh out of college and living on her parents’ farm in Buckeye,
just outside Phoenix. Of course, she had heard about Hitler’s Nazi regime and
his quest to create a worldwide Aryan race. She’d heard about his hatred of the
Jews, which she couldn’t understand. After all, a number of her close friends
were Jews and she always found them interesting and intelligent, great to study
with as well as to hang out with. When she heard about Hitler’s plan to rid the
earth of Jews, she was incensed, which is what led her to respond to a
government ad in the Phoenix Gazette, looking for young American women who were
fluent in Russian and German. This was her chance to help make a difference!

She had learned to speak Russian
thanks to the fact that her grandma, who had immigrated to America with her husband
the previous century, could only speak Russian and used to read her fairy tales
from the homeland. Helen’s favorites were, “The Little Humpbacked Horse”, “The
Frog Princess” and “The Snow Maiden”. They had a profound impression on the
young Helen, and she enjoyed spending time imagining herself in these stories,
whether the princess waiting to be swept off her feet by the dashing Tsarevitch
Ivan, the frog who finds the prince’s arrow and is turned into a beautiful lady
or even the Snow Maiden herself, bringing warmth and joy during the long winter
months. Many nights, Helen would drift off to sleep with the sound of her
grandma’s soothing voice telling her these fables. As she grew older, they
still fired her imagination, and her love of the mysterious country of Russia
grew too. She began to read other stories by Russian writers. Because her
parents hated the rise of Communism in the Russian land, Helen continued to
study her grandma’s language in secret, usually during the night, when she
would lock her door and hide under her covers, reading with a small flashlight,
a Russian-English dictionary always at hand. She enjoyed learning the spelling
of the words, the way they sounded, how the sentences were constructed, and how
the stories flowed. The language was so unlike English, and the stories were of
people and places so different from those she had experienced, she couldn’t
help but delight in her reading. From the fairytales of Pushkin, she moved on
to the beautiful sadness of Yesenin’s poetry, the powerful, new age rhyme of
Mayakovski, and the depth and majesty of Dostoyevsky. But above all these was
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy, some parts
of which she soon knew by heart.

As for German, this was the
language she opted for at school due to her love of Johann Goethe. So good was
her German, in fact, that she pursued it all the way to college and emerged as
a professional linguist, specializing in this language. Many people assumed she
actually
was
German, thanks to her
blonde hair and blue eyes, inherited from her father’s Scandinavian roots. As
such, when Helen responded to the advertisement and went for an interview, she
ended up in a special branch of the U.S. military that was looking to train
spies and scouts for missions in both Russia and Germany.

Over the next year and a half,
Elena, or Helen as she was then known, underwent intensive military training,
including skydiving, shooting, map reading, mine detection and clearance,
facial recognition, memory skills and especially work with radio transceivers
and cipher machines. In addition to this, she had to learn how to behave as a
Russian or German officer
—
how to salute, march, give commands and the like. She proved to be an
exemplary student and she was desperate to put her skills to work in the field.