Mrythdom: Game of Time (48 page)

He knew he was going to die, but somehow it didn’t matter anymore.

*   *   *

Lashyla returned to the ship and began swimming frantic circles around it. What had she done? She swam all through the now pitch black inner maze of corridors, searching for a button she could press to make it right. She tried to trigger the inner doors to shut, but that didn’t work either. The vessel was completely dead. Aurelius would be furious.

But where was he?

She’d looked everywhere inside the ship; she'd scoured the sea floor around the city, even poking her head into a few of the flooded openings. As far as she knew, Aurelius couldn’t swim like her. He couldn’t breathe underwater. So where had he gone? Had he been hiding in some part of the ship she had yet to explore? Had he drowned to death because of her?

Those questions spurred her on, searching, searching—inside and out of his ship. As she made her umpteenth pass around the vessel from the outside, she saw something different. A compartment in the side which she remembered as having been open was now mostly shut. She swam up to it and poked her head in. In the hazy blackness she saw the barest outline of something. She drew near. . . .

And gasped. It was Aurelius; she was sure of it. He was dressed in some strange, bulky clothes, but who else could it be? She swam up to him and turned him over. It was hard to see in the dark, and he was wearing some kind of helmet, but she thought she could make out the barest hint of his features through the clear part of the helmet. She shook him violently, and when that didn’t work, she slapped him with her tail, trying to wake him up, but he didn’t even stir. She’d seen this happen a few times before, when vestals had tried to escape.

Aurelius wouldn’t have long to live if she didn’t get him to fresh air soon.

Lifting him quickly, she dragged him out through the open cargo doors. Kicking powerfully with her tail, she swam for the city. It was the nearest source of fresh air she knew, and it would take longer to get him to the surface.

She only hoped it would be fast enough.

Lashyla broke the surface of the water inside Meria right beside the submarine. She'd swum straight up into the Launch, the most direct way into the city. Now she worked furiously to wrestle Aurelius out of the water, no easy task considering his weight, but she managed to launch him out onto the deck by kicking against the water with her powerful tail.

Exhausted from the adrenaline-fueled swim, she struggled weakly to crawl out of the water beside him. As her tail became exposed to the air it began changing almost immediately into a pair of silky white legs. Lashyla crouched down beside Aurelius, completely naked.

He was laying on the deck like a dead fish. She shook him violently.

“Aurelius!”

His head was still covered by his helmet. Now in the dim coral light of the city she could see that it was definitely him. Perhaps he simply couldn’t hear her through the bucket on his head. She tugged furiously at it, wrenching and tearing to no avail. She tried harder, putting her back into it, throwing her whole weight against Aurelius’s infuriating attire.

Then, by accident she twisted the helmet as she pulled and it yielded suddenly, going flying off behind her to clank with a hollow bang against the side of the submarine.

Looking at Aurelius’s dead, lifeless expression she felt her heart cracking in half. He couldn’t be dead. She would have to live with the knowledge that
she
had killed him.

No!

She slapped him. “Wake up, you stupid man! Wake up . . .” Tears were filling her eyes now. She didn’t know what to do. Was he really dead? She tried to remember how the guards checked to see if someone were alive or dead after a challenge in the Ring, but she couldn’t figure it out. Sometimes she’d watch them place their ears to the person’s chest, as if they could listen for death.

She tried it. Listening carefully . . .

And that was when she noticed it: his chest
was
moving. Weakly, but moving all the same. She sat up abruptly. “Aurelius!”

He didn’t stir.

She blinked giant tears from her eyes, and then she tried something she’d seen her mother do with one of her mates when he’d almost drowned to death. She leaned over and kissed him on the lips.

At first nothing happened.

Then his lips began to move feebly against hers, and she jumped back as if she’d been stung by an electric fish.

“Aurelius!”

He blinked sleepily, bemusedly up at her, and then his eyes flicked down to stare for a moment at her naked breasts, and his brow furrowed as if he didn't understand. “Is this heaven?”

She began sobbing for joy. “You’re alive!” She shook her head, smiling uncontrollably. “You’re
not
dead. . . .”

Aurelius’s sleepy expression vanished. “What?” He sat up suddenly and looked around, which he immediately regretted as a sharp, throbbing pain began thudding between his ears. “Where . . . I’m back in Meria. . . .”

Lashyla joined him in looking around. Suddenly noticed that no one had greeted them at the launch she said, “Where is everyone? There should be guards here, and . . . it looks
different
.”

“It does,” Aurelius agreed. It wasn’t a lot different, but still noticeable enough. The city seemed somehow a bit more neglected, dustier, the air more stale. He turned back to her. “Thanks for saving me.”

She shook her head. “If you’d died, I would have died with you.”

He reached up to cup one lovely cheek. “I missed you. How did you . . . how did you find me? I mean how are you even here? I thought . . .”

“Please don’t be mad, Aurelius. I hid inside your ship. Then after a while I went to look for you and you were gone. I tried to go outside to look, but . . .” Her face flashed with shame and she looked away.

“But . . . ?”

“I opened the door and water came in. Lots of water.”

Aurelius’s eyes went suddenly wide. “You flooded my ship!” He bounced to his feet and shook and angry finger in her face. “You . . . you . . .” He was shaking his head in horrified disbelief.

“I didn’t mean to. . . .” Lashyla began crying again.

Something in Aurelius’s angry expression cracked and he slowly lowered his accusing finger. He decided to drop the subject for now. Turning toward the submarine docked in the Launch, he said, “I need to check something inside that ship.”

She followed his gaze. “Check what?”

“Come on.” He took her hand to help her up, and together they walked toward the waiting vessel.

As they descended the ancient ladder into the submarine it groaned and creaked with age. The rungs were horrible dusty, and the air was even staler inside the ship than it had been in the Launch. The inside of the submarine smelled sharply of metallic residues and ancient dust. When the ship’s lights didn’t immediately come on in response to their presence as they’d done before, Aurelius knew something was wrong. He began to fear the worst. Maybe he’d been catapulted far, far into the future, perhaps to a time long past the one where the submarine had still been working. . . .

They walked carefully through the pitch black interior of the ship. Aurelius had to feel his way along the walls toward the cockpit. Suddenly Lashyla grabbed his hands in hers and turned him to face her, stopping his slow forward progress. He noticed her blue eyes glowing faintly in the dark, and he almost jumped with fright. “What is it?” he asked.

“Use
my
eyes, Aurelius.” And with that, she led him onward, carefully guiding him easily toward the cockpit. He marveled at that for a moment, but then he realized: of course she could see better than him. Mermaids knew little else but the murky depths of the sea and the coral-lit gloom of their city.

When they reached the cockpit, the canopy was allowing a soft blue-green light in through the water, and he could see. Aurelius made his way to the controls. Sitting down behind the darkened displays, he looked around for the set of switches which would power the vessel up. That was assuming the vessel was still capable of powering up . . .

“What are you looking for?” Lashyla asked.

“A way to . . .” In his periphery he caught a glimpse of her flicking a switch, and the displays came to life for him with a whirr of color and light. Lights snapped on inside the cockpit and an ominous rumbling began underfoot.

He was staring at her.

“Was that it?” she asked with a smile.

His pride was wounded. “Yeah . . . well, I guess you would know better than me how to start this thing. . . .” Aurelius turned to study the displays with a frown. One in particular. Reactor power was down to emergency levels, and there were a hundred different maintenance warnings: check this, check that, fill this, clean that, replace this. . . . The ship was a mess.

Lashyla seemed to realize it too. “What is all of this? Someone has ruined everything! I’ll have them thrown into the Ring!” She cast a quick, angry look over her shoulder as though she were about to rush off and do just that.

Aurelius shook his head. “There might not
be
a Ring, Lashyla.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this isn’t the time we left.” He began toggling the display, dismissing all the various warnings in order to query the shipboard computer for something else. A steam of errors issued from the control system with noisy beeps; no doubt a lot of different computer components had failed from age and lack of maintenance, but he was able to dismiss those and still query for the information he was looking for. Date and time.

When he’d last checked the date aboard the submarine it had been 57,000-something. Now the numbers which blinked up on screen read 55,422. Had he misremembered the date? Aurelius shook his head. “Well, so much for that idea.”

Lashyla was watching the display carefully. “That’s not the date,” she said.

He looked up at her, suddenly curious. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s not right; someone changed it. The year is 57,405—but we just say oh-five. It’s off by almost . . . two thousand years.”

Aurelius blinked at the screen, feeling suddenly horribly sick. Not only was he back in the future again, but it wasn’t even a future he recognized. It was a two-thousand-year-old version of it. Gabrian, Esephalia, Reven, Malgore . . . none of them had even been born yet.

“Ahhh . . . this is not good.” Aurelius queried the computer some more, pulling up the code for the ship’s internal clock. He couldn’t find anything wrong with it, and when he did an internal diagnostic check, artificially racing the time forward a thousand years and then racing it back, there were no anomalies. The ship was keeping time perfectly, as it had been for many thousands of years since the time in which he’d been born.

“What is it?” Lashyla was frowning at the code on the screen and the results of the test, clearly not comprehending the significance.

Aurelius turned to her with wide, horrified eyes. “Lashyla.” He spoke slowly, deliberately, as he would if trying to explain a difficult concept to a child. “We traveled back through time, but we arrived in a time that’s two thousand years before yours and many more thousands after mine.”

“What?” She shook her head, uncomprehending.

“This is not the Meria you knew. It’s not the Mrythdom
we
knew. It’s not even close.”

“Aurelius, you’ve gone gluey! I’m going to go speak to my mother right now.” With that, Lashyla turned and stalked away. A moment later, he heard her ascending the rungs of the ladder. He just sat there in shock before he stood up and followed her. Just before he left, he shut the ship down to save power. They were going to need it. He’d have to fix the submarine sometime later—probably have to fix a lot of the rest of the city, too. The mermaids had probably had a chance to fix and clean city in the years they’d been living in it, but now, before they’d even arrived, he would have to do it all on his own.

Aurelius followed Lashyla out into the Launch, but he kept a respectable distance behind her, letting her shock sink in gradually. He spent a moment admiring her bare, naked curves as she walked, and he began to consider that his fate wasn’t so bad, after all. He was trapped underwater with a beautiful woman in a much simpler time, a time where his unique knowledge of how to resuscitate the old technology lying scattered and broken across the face of the planet would put him in good stead. His ship would likely never fly again, but he could salvage components from it to repair the submarine. Meria would have to have whole lockers full of proper diving equipment with which he could accomplish the task. He could also salvage his cargo hold full of high-tech weapons and armor. . . . With all of that, he would be a king.

No, it wouldn’t be such a bad life for him here in the future.

As they stalked down the deserted corridors of the city, Lashyla’s steps grew less and less certain, slower, and slower. Eventually, they reached the antechamber with the crystal fountain inside the Crystal Palace hotel where Lashyla and her mother had had their quarters, and now Lashyla stopped altogether. She was staring at the fountain.

Aurelius walked up behind her, very cautiously, aware that she was in shock. The reality was only now hitting her. He knew what that felt like. He’d experienced the same thing when he’d first been brought to the future to discover that the world as he knew it was gone.

Aurelius slowly circled his arms around her waist, and she didn’t resist him, but she turned to look over her shoulder, to gaze up at him with the wide, frightened eyes of a child. “It’s gone,” she said.

He frowned. “What’s gone?”

“The sculpture.”