Anna looked out across the barnyard the next morning. The grounds were quiet. Most of the staff were at the fair and only a skeleton crew remained. Past the barns and the trees, a dark wall of clouds had formed along the horizon. Anna closed her eyes and laid her head back down on her folded knees and listened to the winds whip through the branches of the old Bur oak. She sat on the steps leading to the front porch with her arms wrapped around her legs in a cocoon and breathed shallow breaths.
From behind her, the screen door opened with the sound of squeaking hinges, but she didn’t move.
“Morning, Anna. Want to head with me to the . . .” Uncle Jack stopped. Something about Anna’s posture and how her hair hung down across her face as if she were trying to hide, made him stop. “Anna?”
She didn’t move.
“Anna?” Uncle Jack asked again.
He sat down next to his niece and put his arm around her shoulder, then noticed the bruises on her wrists and hands. His heart skipped.
“Did someone hurt you?” Uncle Jack asked, his voice lower now.
Anna slowly lifted her head from her knees and glanced over at her uncle with a hollow look, her eyes rimmed red.
“Mara’s gone,” Anna said.
“What do you mean? When will she be back?” Uncle Jack asked.
“She’s not coming back. She’s gone,” Anna said. “For good.”
“Oh. I see,” Uncle Jack said, but he clearly didn’t see or understand. Anna knew these words were just placeholders to use until he could fully process what had just been said.
He looked out absently across the barnyard as if he expected to see Mara’s motorcycle parked out front, but the barnyard was empty. In the distance, a silent flash of lightning broke through the clouds. A storm was forming early. A big one from the looks of it, he thought. Then Anna’s words clicked. Gone. For good. Jack remembered reading once that heartache is usually felt as pain somewhere in the body, a dull ache or a piercing in the lungs or stomach. But this was no singular pain, just a crushing feeling that took his breath away.
“Ok. I really didn’t expect that this morning,” Uncle Jack said as he absently withdrew his arm from Anna’s shoulder and leaned heavily against his own knees. “Well, that’s a real kick in the gut. Did she say why?”
“Not really. Nothing made sense,” Anna said.
“I wondered why she didn’t come to the fair last night,” Uncle Jack said. “Was it her family?”
“She doesn’t have any family,” Anna said.
“Oh,” Uncle Jack said absently. “I guess I really didn’t know her after all.”
“Neither did I.”
“Are you ok?” Uncle Jack asked.
“No,” Anna said, then leaned her head against her uncle’s shoulder.
“Me either,” Uncle Jack looked down and gave a weak smile. “Well, it looks like it’s just you and me again.”
Anna wrapped her arm around her uncle’s and pulled herself closer. The two looked out at the swaying trees and the dirt kicking up in small dust devils across the lot. The open gate in the front had swung open in the wind and smacked against the fence like a steady tap against the door. The dark clouds in the distance had mushroomed out into a giant round tower, its outer edges swirling and undulating. And it was moving fast from the north on a straight course toward the farm.
“Hmmm. I don’t like the look of that storm. We might need to shelter,” Uncle Jack said.
From down the road, they could hear faint shouts fading in and out with the gusts of wind. Adrenaline shot through her body. She hoped, they both hoped, that it was Mara returning after all. But instead, three small figures appeared over the rise, riding their bikes and shouting as they drew closer.
“Anna!” Scout shouted out as he jumped from his bike and headed through the open gate.
Lula and Fiona followed right behind. Mara looked up at her friends, her hair still matted across her face, and worked up a faint smile.
“How come you didn’t answer our texts?” Lula said. Her eyes wide and large behind her thick glasses. “We were worried sick?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did Del do something to you? Because I don’t care how big he is. I’ll clock him, I swear,” Scout shouted above the wind.
Anna closed her eyes and laid her head back on her knees. She knew they meant well, but she was exhausted. Uncle Jack stood and placed one hand on Anna’s shoulder and silently signaled for her friends to give her space.
“Mara is gone,” Uncle Jack said softly.
“Oh,” Fiona said out loud.
The three friends looked at each other, each face a different expression of concern. They resisted the urge to say anything at that moment, even Scout, as they walked slowly up the steps to Anna’s side. One at a time, they leaned in, and Anna could feel their weight against her shoulders and back as she stared at a line of ants scurrying in and out of a crack in the wooden steps between her feet.
Lightning flashed again just over the tree line that separated the farm from Tyson’s Lake. The storm was close now, but still made no sound except for the wind bending trees and whistling through cracks in the front windows. Lightning struck again and again in the exact same spot, just over the lake several miles away. Still, no sound. And now the dark slate clouds began to spiral ominously.
“Ok, that’s not good. Come on guys. I think it’s time we shelter,” Uncle Jack said as he signaled for the others to follow. “Come on.”
<Anna!>
The voice over the iCom startled her and sent prickly shards shooting down her arms and back. She bolted upright, accidentally smacking Scout along the side of his head.
“Owww!”
“SID?!” Anna called out loud, not caring who could hear.
Fiona looked confused. “Who is Sid?”
Anna ignored her friend and stood straight up.
<Mara ordered me not to call you. But I’m calling you anyway, on my own accord. I feel I have the right since you are my friend, too. The Others are here.>
“Why didn’t you go?!” Anna cried out as she was speaking to someone from a distance, her gaze toward the storm.
Her three friends stood stunned. Uncle Jack took a step forward.
“Anna. Come on. We need to shelter,” Uncle Jack said.
<I can see them, Anna. Even I can see them. There are so many colors, so many stars.>
Anna turned and looked back. Her face now flush, as adrenaline coursed through her body. Her eyes dilated and opened wide.
“I have to go,” Anna shouted above the growing wind.
“Not in this storm, Anna!” Uncle Jack shouted back.
Anna leaped from the porch and landed in a crouch. She rose slowly and turned to face her uncle with her hands raised to her sides.
“I’m sorry, but Mara needs me. I’ll explain later!” Anna said as her body rose inches from the ground.
For a moment, Uncle Jack was afraid the wind had somehow caught ahold of her and was going to carry her away. But then Anna rose straight up into the sky as if guided by her own will and floated steadily against the swirling winds twenty feet above the ground. Lula sucked in air and made an accidental whistling noise through her teeth, as Scout fell back hard on his butt.
“I’ll explain all of it later!” Anna shouted, then turned and flew toward the heart of the storm.
The storm was in the shape of a cylinder, rising and spinning just above the lake. A giant funnel fixed in space. Three bone-white figures dressed in black floated motionless above Mara’s lawn forming a perfect triangle: their focus on a small figure directly beneath them on the ground below.
It was Mara. She sat on the grass outside of what used to be her home, now an empty space except for a scattering of silver boxes. She had her arms wrapped around her legs and looked up into the sky. Her eyes were closed and her face serene.
Anna weaved her way past the motionless Others and landed silently on the grass next to Mara. She fell on her knees and leaned forward to put her hand gently on her friend’s shoulders. Mara’s eyes fluttered open as if waking from a deep sleep.
“I’m glad to see you,” Mara said.
Anna threw her arms around her friend and buried her head into her shoulder. Mara’s hair covered her face and blocked out the storm and muted the sound of the wind.
“Why didn’t you leave when you had a chance?” Anna’s voice cracked.
“You’re going to have to make up your mind, Anna. Do you want me to stay or go?”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what I was saying last night,” Anna said as she leaned back on her heels.
“No. You knew exactly what you were saying. And you were right about everything. I was afraid and that fear almost led me to make the most terrible mistake. Leaving you, your uncle, all this,” Mara said. “When I closed the door on you last night, I just stood by the wall and listened to you go on. It broke my heart, Anna. At that moment, I realized I couldn’t leave you, but I also couldn’t stay. So, I sat down right here and looked out across the lake all night and waited for whatever was going to come.”
“Maybe there’s still a chance. I can distract them . . .” Anna looked up at the floating figures for the first time and felt a sudden sense of vertigo.
Just above the three figures, in the center of the spinning storm, the sky opened up into a tapestry of stars and constellations woven together by a gaseous cloud the color of cobalt blue and the deepest purple Anna had ever seen. The heart of the universe.
“Good luck with that,” Mara nodded up toward the sky. “I have to say. It’s beautiful though.”
“Why are they just floating there?”
“I don’t know, but they don’t seem to be in a rush. Which is fine with me. I’m not either. They’ve just been like that for hours.”
“But that’s impossible. I saw the storm move in just minutes ago,” Anna said.
<Mara is right, Anna. Time here under the storm doesn’t appear to be tracking with external sensors. What appears to be hours for us, is just minutes to anything outside this vortex. And the creatures themselves are fascinating. They seem to be composed of a new phase of matter, constantly cycling between states of being without ever losing energy. That has profound philosophical implications, don’t you think? I’m going to continue to run tests for as long as I can.>
“Oh, there is still so much to learn,” Mara sighed. “I’m glad you came, Anna. I didn’t want last night to be the way you remembered me. Running. Afraid. Not like that.”
Anna leaped to her feet and turned to face the creatures.
“Why don’t you just leave us alone?!” Anna shouted into the wind.
The Others continued to float unmoving, expressionless.
“Anna,” Mara said, her voice tired.
Anna scoured the ground, desperately looking for something, anything to use as a weapon when she came across an oval rock, perfect for skipping across water. She reared back and threw it with all her strength. The rock flew in a perfect arc straight at the bone-white head of one of the figures, only to pass harmlessly through its body and out into the lake with a splash.
“I don’t think that’s going to work,” Mara shook her head. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do. I think I knew that the moment I first saw them. This was inevitable, Anna. But it’s better this, than living alone without you.”
Suddenly, the Others moved in unison; a small, almost imperceptible tilt of the head, followed by a flash of light and a short, deep burst of sound like an oboe.
“That’s new,” Mara said as she stood up, stiff-legged.
<It appears that the Others are now tracking with external time.>
All three creatures lifted their hands in unison. Another bright light, the color of coral, flashed behind them. Followed by another bright light and a deep, sustained trumpet blast that lasted seconds.
“What are they doing?” Anna called out.
“Beginning the process, I think,” Mara said weakly, then stumbled back. “Oh. I don’t feel so good.”
Anna rushed to her friend’s side and put her arm around her waist, as musical notes began to play above them in sync with the bursts of lights. Musical notes. Anna couldn’t think of any other way to describe what she was hearing. Some notes were short and bright, others sustained and rumbling. A pattern formed like language.
“Go away!” Anna shouted.
The notes stopped.
“Who are you!?” Anna shouted again.
One of the figures, only one, turned its gaze toward Anna; its eyes as bright as suns.
“We are what we are.”
“That’s not an answer!” Anna shouted back.
“We are what we are. We question and we shape. We sing and we weave.”
Anna could feel her friend go limp in her arms and set her gently back onto the grass.
“Hold on, Mara. Just hold on,” Anna said.
As Mara laid back, she looked up past Anna and into the vortex with eyes glassy and distant, and muttered quietly.
“Oh my. Do you see what I see?”
“I don’t see anything, Mara. What is it”
“I’m there. I’m there again in the time of the great warming. My first day of time travel. How funny,” Mara said in a whisper. “I can tell now. Somehow, I can tell. This is how it all started.”
Mara closed her eyes and let her arms fall limply to her sides. Her mouth parted as she let out a great sigh.
“Mara. Hold on,” Anna said then turned back to the Others. “What are you doing to her?”
“She sees her path. Where it has been and where it is going. A multitude.”
“Make it stop!”
“Not until her path has played out.”
Anna looked desperately around her for something she could use.
“SID, help me!”
<I’m sorry, Anna. But there is nothing I can do.>
Anna’s shoulders slumped. She was powerless. All the things she had learned and seen, and all that she could do were not enough. This was it. And she knew it. She looked up into the face of the Other who spoke last. There were no options left.
“Why not take me? Why her?”
The wind died down to almost nothing as the clouds overhead hung frozen like ice sculptures. The world was still. No sounds or notes or movement other than grass bending gently in the slight breeze. Anna could hear her heartbeat, louder than it should be and external to her own body as if playing from a nearby speaker. Each pulse vibrated in sync with the stars and galaxies that pulsed overhead. Then the Other spoke.
“You do not understand. Not even now, child. This has never been about the time traveler. It has always been about you.”
Anna looked up into the face of the Other. Its eyes were blazing now and all consuming, like the surface of the sun. Anna could feel herself begin to dissolve, her feet and hands and legs touching nothing, as the world around her became a flatland of intense white for as far as she could see. She was floating now.
“She has her path . . .”
Anna sensed the words more than she heard them.
“As you have yours . . .”
And suddenly, the white plains parted like a mist and Anna was flying across a familiar terrain; the farm, her uncle’s farm, but instead of just covering a few miles, it now covered tens of miles. Strange new structures blended in with the old and dotted the landscape. Some structures were made of glass and shot up like giant corkscrews into the sky and contained spiraling fields of crops and trees and ever running streams of recycled water. Other structures gleamed in the sun, row after row. Her uncle’s house was still there, but it was now connected to a giant sloping structure of glass and wood and was bookended with a row of flags on one side, and a gleaming metallic spire on the other.
Dozens of children played out in an empty field just beyond the sloping structure, a school, as giant airships buoyed by hot air or gas or anti-gravity—Anna couldn’t tell—cast shadows across the grass like rolling clouds.
Underneath the ground, a tube the size of a great hall ran from her uncle’s farm to the closest city, which branched off to other cities and regions in a network that looked like mycelium. Inside the tube, small trains floated just above shining tracks and moved faster than the speed of sound.
Tyson Lake still gleamed in the sun. But, further out, to the Great Lakes and the oceans just beyond, ships with giant metal sails moved silently across the waters.
Anna went farther out still, past any one place or time. She saw a young boy, sitting out in a small garden in the middle of a forgotten neighborhood. The stars above his head were dimmed by the dull lights of the city. Other children appeared, some younger, some older; faces she had never met but somehow knew she would, someday, and maybe soon. One stood hiding under the shade of a dying tree, her feet dusty and cracked with red clay. Another child sat in a towering concrete apartment talking to an AI she had just discovered about a school in a far-off land.
Other faces and structures, rolling farmland and airships passed by in an ever-increasing rate until they blurred together into a single bright haze like the sun shining through mist.
A voice echoed in the white fog.
“. . . and our purpose has been to determine whether those two paths would merge in a way that could sustain. We learned our answer only today. Here, at this time. In this place. There are no certainties, only possibilities, and the way forward will be hard. But the path has become clear, and it is, as it always has been, for you to make.”
The white haze faded to black, and the world became still. Anna could feel the slightest of breezes across her skin and the smell of fresh soil after a rain.
She blinked. Mara was looking down at her and smiling and cradling her head in her hands. The clouds had parted above her, and the sun now shined through the cracks and reflected off the surface of the lake.
“What happened?” Anna asked.
“I don’t know, but whatever it was, it stopped the storm,” Mara said. “You’ve been out for a good twenty minutes.”
“Where are they?”
“The Others? They’re still there,” Mara looked up. “But I think we’re ok. At least that’s what they told me.”
“They talked to you, too?” Anna asked.
Mara nodded, as Anna sat up. The two looked at each other, ragged and tired, then hugged each other hard until the tips of their fingers turned white. After what seemed like minutes their legs began to cramp, and the two stood up arm in arm and faced the Others together for the first time.
“What now?” Anna called out to them.
“A blank slate untethered to the future or past. Just now. Just the two of you,” the voice of the Other resonated in their heads.
“What does that even mean?” Anna looked puzzled.
“It means the time traveler must leave behind all that she has brought with her. This time you are part of is fragile and can be easily broken.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. I already finished the heavy packing,” Mara said.
“All that she has brought with her.”
Anna was still puzzled and thought the Others were stuck in a loop. But Mara stopped cold. She suddenly understood what the Others had meant, and a rising sense of despair came rushing back. Not now. Not when they were so close.
“No, no, no,” Mara stepped forward, shaking her head, and cried out at the Others. “Tell me what you mean?”
The three figures continued to float above their heads. Their black clothes and bone-white skin contrasted with the patches of blue sky behind them. But now they began to move in a slow circular motion.
“All.”
“What’s going on, Mara?” Anna asked. “What are they saying?”
Mara ignored her.
“You can’t take SID. You can’t. It’s a sentient being and my friend. My oldest friend,” Mara implored.
“It’s not of this time.”
Mara turned in a circle, tracking the swirling motion of the Others just above her. They were moving faster now, and the wind began to kick up in gusts again.
“No,” Anna whispered, suddenly realizing what was unfolding in front of her.
“SID. Go offline now,” Mara commanded.
<Mara.>
“SID. Go offline now.”
<Mara. The Others have been talking to me, too. I understand now. I understand it is time for me to go.>
“SID. No.”
<It’s okay, Mara. You’ll be okay. I’m grateful for this time I’ve had with you and Anna. I’m grateful for our friendship. I have learned so much. Patience being my greatest lesson.>
“That’s not funny, SID. I order you to go offline now. Please!” Mara cried out.
<I’m afraid that’s not your decision to make, Mara. It is time for me to go. Goodbye.>
The wind swirled around them as the silver boxes stacked just feet behind, filled with fabricators and advanced materials and SID’s central processing plane, began to dissolve like dust. Anna could feel a cold sensation on her wrists where her iCom had been applied and her anti-gravity boots, once a perfect fit, began to sag and lose their shape. She looked over at Mara, whose white bodysuit now hung wrinkled and dull on her frame like standard cloth. No shimmering light. Anna could feel the physical absence of the connection she had grown so accustomed to over the past months; to the dozens of sensors, and to her iCom, to Mara and especially now, SID. A small trace of those connections remained like a phantom limb.
With a soft hush like a sigh, the Others suddenly disappeared, and with them, all remaining vestiges of Mara’s past and future life. SID was gone.