Time's Mirror: A CHRONOS Files Novella (The CHRONOS Files) (2 page)

My hand is on top of my face.

It's the first thing I see when I open my eyes. My hand, my arm, the black lace of my blouse. The blouse that will push Jason right over the edge.

Except I don’t think I’m going to make it to my violin lesson today. I can’t move my legs. In fact, I can barely move at all.

I smell smoke. And something else. Blood, maybe.

Where the hell am I? How did I get here? Why is my hand on my face?

The last thing I remember is watching the raindrops work their way down the windshield, and goofing around with the stupid pendant, looking at that odd, static-filled square of black hanging above it. Then the static cleared up. The square was pure black, with a few specks of light in the distance. And I was falling into that blackness.

Why can’t I move? Why is my hand on my face? And why does my brain keep insisting that the hand on my face is more important at this moment than the fact that every inch of my body is in pain? More important than the blood dripping down the back of my neck.

There's nothing weird about my hand being on my face. Except…I can't
feel
my face under my hand. The angle seems wrong, too. I can see the glow of the green medallion in that hand, but I also feel that same medallion in the hand down by my side. I feel the cord wrapped around my wrist. When I squeeze the disk tightly, the sharp edge cuts into my palm.

Yep. It’s definitely in my hand.

And the hand and the medallion can't be both places at once.

My mind drifts away and eventually settles on a memory from a few years ago. I’m sitting in the living room with my dad. He’s watching
20/20
and I’m doing the crossword puzzle in the
TV Guide
, mostly because I don’t want to go to bed yet. Barbara Walters comes on with this story about amputees who can still feel their limbs even though—

That thought rips a scream from my throat. The extra arm moves then, and I discover there's a body attached to it. An entire extra me. Wearing the same clothes, with the monogrammed purse Deborah gave me for Christmas strapped across her body. That seems to be the only difference. I must have dropped mine during the fall.

Stranger still, at the very same time that I see this other me and feel her weight on top of me, I also remember her
not
being here. I don't mean a memory from before she arrived. It’s not that she wasn't here and then suddenly she was. I remember
both
things at the same time. They’re both equally true, and that makes my head ache in an entirely different way.

I have to get out of here, but my legs still won't move. They seem to be pinned down.

Turning my head to the right, I see her face—
my
face—tinted a sickly green from the key. A chair of some sort is just behind her, leaning at a drunken angle. In fact, the entire room seems to be tipped downward, toward the center, almost like gravity is stronger there. Like we're inside a funnel.

She moans again, and opens one eye, staring back at me. When she moves, the medallion in her hand brushes against my face and a sensation like a static shock—a big one—runs through me. She must feel it too, because she moves her hand away.

I don’t know what she is or why she’s here. But I’m certain that this other me shouldn't exist. And from the way her eyes just narrowed, I’m pretty sure she's thinking the same damn thing about me.

When I try to move my arm at the shoulder to push her off, a blinding pain rips through my back. So I try my lower arm. It moves just enough for me to loop one finger under the black cord strapped around her wrist.

I pull the cord. She tightens her grip when she feels the tug, but it's too late. I flick the medallion to the ground on the other side of my body and shove her away.

Or rather I attempt to shove. It's more like a feeble nudge. I can't see what's on top of my legs, can't even feel the weight, really. Just a sense of pressure from a few inches above the knee.

But I
can
move my lower arm. I feel around the space beside me until my fingers locate a large chunk of something hard and jagged. A rock, or maybe cement.

She pulls herself across my upper body, reaching for the other medallion. Her legs seem to be working just fine. In fact, she's in better shape overall, probably because I cushioned her fall.

When her hand locks on to the medallion, my own face looks back at me with a grin of triumph.

It's instinct. Pure self-preservation. I bring the rock I’m holding down against the side of her head. It isn't a very hard blow, since I can barely move my arm, but the edge of the rock is sharp enough that she doesn’t want a second helping. She dodges away. Just a few inches to the left, toward that oddly tilted chair.

She reaches for the chair to brace herself. A look of pure terror fills her eyes as the chair slides even further, tumbling downward, into the funnel.

"Help me!" She grabs for my blouse, untucking it from my skirt. As she struggles to get a better grip on the fabric, the medallion she’s carrying slips from her fingers. It slides across the floor and disappears into the hole.

The other me pulls my upper body toward her, wrenching it away from the legs that won’t move, that are pinned to the floor by something I can’t see.

We both scream the same scream, in stereo.

I smash the rock downward again, this time on the hand grasping my shirt. Her fingers open.

She screams again when she falls, but I don't join her this time. I just clutch the rock and my medallion to my chest, and lie there, whimpering.

"Dad! Mom! Anybody? Someone help me! Please!"

But no one comes.

My bones are being ripped from my flesh. I try to scream, but no sound comes out.

Voices. A man's face.

Arms lifting me.

Then it’s just the blackness again.

When I open my eyes, I see green. Everywhere. It's like floating inside a bed of lime-green Jell-O. I flex my fingers through the stuff and then carefully move my arms. They move, both from the elbow and the shoulder, but my legs don’t respond. I can't even tell for certain that they're there.

I peer through the goop, searching for Deb, even though I know she’s not here. Wherever this place is, it’s nothing like the hospital where she had her tonsils removed last fall.

The next time I wake up, the medallion is missing. That's when I realize the goo I've been lying in isn't really green. It was just reflecting the light from the pendant. The room still seems to have a faint green glow, but the vivid light is gone.

There’s no pain when I’m inside the tub of goo. There's only boredom when I’m awake and nightmares when I sleep. Nightmares where I’m falling into the dark. Nightmares where the girl with my face crawls out of that hole. And this time, the rock is in
her
hand.

People come into the room twice a day and pull me out of the tub. There's
plenty
of pain on the outside. Sometimes, a machine runs a thin wire along the bottom of my foot or performs one of the dozens of other tortures in its routine. Then back into the boring goop I go.

I prefer the boredom at the beginning, because the pain is intense. But after a while—weeks? months?—even pain is better than just lying here staring at the ceiling. That's about the time someone decides the goop is now only for nighttime. Only for sleep.

During the day, I sit on a bed that looks very much like a normal hospital bed. Rails on the side, but the bed seems to respond to my movements. When I lean backward, it reclines. When I try to sit up, it helps me. And it’s softer, conforming to my body.

I don’t remember eating when I spent my days in the goop. But now that I’m out, they bring food several times a day and I eat and drink what they put in front of me. Except for the meat. They get the point after a day or two and start bringing me cheese and nuts. Mostly it’s healthy stuff, but one of them slipped me a square of chocolate last week. The next day, she asked if I wanted more. Said she'd get me a whole bar if I'd say something. If I’d answer their questions.

As bribes go, it's pathetic. Unless she's offering me a large bag of Cheetos and a cherry Slurpee with that chocolate bar, it's not even tempting.

I'll talk when I have something to say.

For the first few weeks, I tried really hard to convince myself that this is just a different country. That this is a high-tech
Six Million Dollar Man
kind of place, maybe somewhere in Europe or India. Most of the doctors and attendants I've seen are dark-skinned. Or at least darker than I am, even after summers at the pool. Hair color tells me nothing. There's every color of hair in the freakin' rainbow, often on the same person. Cyndi Lauper would feel right at home here. Some of the words they use are odd, but it’s definitely English.

The tattoo thingies are what finally force me to accept that I'm either not on Earth or I’m not in 1984. Most people have at least one of the tattoos, and nearly all of them
move
. One of the men who lifts me out of the goo-tub has an image of a little girl's face on the inside of his arm. When he caught me staring, he said it was his daughter when she was tiny. Said how nice it was to look at the picture now that she's all grown up. He tapped the image and then twisted his arm around so that I could see the video that hovered about two inches above his skin…that same little girl dancing in a tutu.

The tutu looks a lot like the one I wore six or seven years ago when I thought ballet was cool. But everything else in this place is pure
Star Wars
.

I think maybe they use the tattoos as telephones, too, because one guy touched his and then started talking about something that didn't have anything at all to do with my therapy. Acted like I wasn’t even in the room, but I couldn’t hear anyone else talking.

Once I'm somewhat mobile, they start moving me over to the windows, into the sunshine. The Washington Monument off in the distance confirms that I’m still in DC, but the layout of the city seems different. Less green space. More water.

The attendant comes in once I’m settled and drops the flat black rectangle into my lap again. It’s about the size and shape of a Pop-Tart. Probably another of their psych tests. No thanks. I push it aside and close my eyes, just as I did yesterday and the day before.

"Come on," she says, coaxing my head back toward the front. "You need something to keep your mind clicking. Why stare at the wall all day? You can game. Or read. Watch a vid. Just blink twice and then nav with your eyes."

She leaves the Pop-Tart thingamajig in my lap this time, and after a while, I start playing around with it. It's frustrating as hell at first, but eventually a transparent screen sort of pops up in front of me. It reminds me of how the hologram of Princess Leia shows up when Luke presses the button on R2-D2…it’s there, but you can still kind of see through it. The music selection totally sucks and there aren't any games I recognize on the menu, but a few shows seem interesting. Sort of like soap operas, except they keep pausing at key moments, waiting for me to make a choice. Should Daura confess to Elon? Should Abro return the levbar he took from Sam? This would be a lot more fun with Deb around to make fun of their accents and clothes and bad acting, but it passes the time.

When it eventually dawns on me that these little
Choose Your Own Adventure
stories are just another form of mental exam, I push the Pop-Tart aside. But after few hours, boredom wins out and I search around until I locate books. Thousands of them. Mostly writers I don't recognize, but there are exceptions. Some I know from school, like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters. Poe. A lot of stuff by Stephen King, including
The Shining
, which Mother confiscated last year because…you guessed it, too
old
for me.

I was born in 1970. I've been told it’s now October 2305. I did the math and I'm pretty sure that makes me an adult, so I'll read any damn thing I want. And since they're probably analyzing the books I choose, the King stories will give them something to chew on. They can wonder whether I'm just waiting for the right moment to go all
Firestarter
on them.