Timesurfers (11 page)

“I probably would have gone with ‘hello’ to
break the ice. But that was definitely another option,” Austin
said.

“Where am I?” She demanded.

“You’re outside the Break,” Austin said.

“You could have killed her.” Naitanui gave
Austin a look Cate was all too familiar look. Her mother used it
often. It came with an “I’ll deal with you later” clause.

“But I didn’t. We found her. I couldn’t risk
her vanishing.”

“Inside.” Naitanui stepped backward through
the cascading water.

“Huh?” Cate muttered. The water didn’t splash
on Naitanui’s head. He passed through, leaving the water
undisturbed. She pulled back, digging her heels into the ground and
crossing her arms. Until Austin did some explaining, she wasn’t
going a step further.

“Have it your way.” Austin bent and grabbed
her behind the knees, then slung her over his shoulder.

“Put me down.” She pounded on his back with
her fists. Unperturbed, he strode toward where Naitanui had
disappeared. A shudder ran through her body, and the waterfall was
behind them. They had walked straight through and arrived dry on
the other side. She stretched to touch the water, and her fingers
glided through nothing. Another shudder ran up her arm yet it
remained dry.

“It’s a glamour.” Austin set her down. “More
magic.” He strolled further into the cave, heading for an opening
in the rock wall. The slightest hint of light filtered through the
gap.

She looked from Austin to the waterfall,
deliberating whether to run or follow.

“You can’t go back to 2014 without me. Come
and learn about time travel.” Austin ducked through the archway.
“You demanded I bring you here for answers, so man up and come and
get them.”

Little puffs of red dirt rose as she marched
after him.
Time travel. What the hell?
This wasn’t going at all how she expected. Austin sank lower into
the ground the further he walked. If she lost him, she’d be
screwed. She hesitated at the tunnel entrance. Austin was halfway
down the longest line of steps she had ever seen.

Light filtered through openings high above,
highlighting the descent with a faint glow. She prodded with her
toe and found the next step. With a deep breath, she slid forward.
Her outstretched arms reached either side of the tunnel, and her
fingers brushed smooth, undulating rock.

She crinkled her nose as damp, heavy air that
smelled of old...something...wrapped around her. Austin disappeared
around a bend. Her feet slipped and skidded as she made her way
down the uneven steps following his annoying, tuneless whistle. She
turned the bend, and her jaw hit the floor.

“Welcome to the Break.” Austin plonked on a
plush black leather chair and swung his boots onto a massive,
rectangular stone table. He pointed to a crystal jug and glasses at
the far end. “There’s some water if you still want it.”

The rock walls stretched as high as Cate
could see. The space was bigger than a football field. “What is
this?” Tunnel entrances sat at random intervals around the
walls.

“Extinct volcano,” Austin said.

“Don’t they erupt?”

“I said
extinct
volcano—lower risk.”

Cate had seen NASA headquarters on the
television. This looked like NASA on steroids. Three enormous flat
screens, each the size of a bus, were fixed end to end along one
rock wall. Overhead a line of six transparent cubes hung along the
middle of the room. The faces of each cube were the size of a movie
screen and showed a three-dimensional image. They rotated slowly
around their own axis, providing a 360 degree view of the scene
they displayed. A row of tables sat under the cubes, their glass
tops flashing with neon green, red, and blue lights. The lights
stopped and the tops displayed a picture for a few seconds. The
process then repeated. There was a real “NASA meets
Lord of the Rings
” vibe. She saw no people anywhere
though.

“Is that me?” Cate squeaked, pointing to a
cube.

“Yes.” Naitanui adjusted a glowing dial and
smacked a red button on one of the computer consoles. He’d changed
into an out of shape white T-shirt and faded red board shorts.
“Hold that thought. I have two teams returning from their
missions.”

Two men wearing old fashioned life jackets
appeared in the centre of the room, dripping with water and
shivering. “The ship hit the iceberg and then sank on schedule
three hours later. Instead of the sixteen lifeboats she actually
carried on that maiden voyage, the full complement of twenty
lifeboats she was built to carry as well as some extras were
available. Mortez hid the extra ones in the storage area with a
glamour. Her people were also embedded in the crew to attempt to
pack more passengers into each life boat. We effectively nullified
her attempts to
minimise
loss of life. The ship took two minutes to completely sink after it
snapped in half. The
Carpathia
arrived an
hour and a half after the ship sank and rescued 705 passengers. The
necessary 1517 men, women and children perished. The time line is
intact.” A tall man with grey hair and a moustache reported.

Naitanui nodded. “Well done, gentlemen.
Dismissed.”

“Are they talking about the
Titanic
?” Cate asked.

“Yes, Mortez regularly attempts to rectify
that tragedy.” Naitanui didn’t look up.

“But that would be a good thing.”

“It’s not what history intended. After the
Titanic
sank changes were made to how
ships were constructed. Safety regulations which are still used
today were put in place to ensure inadequate lifeboats would never
be a problem again. Now if you’ll turn your mind to the cubes.
That’s you breaking Zach’s nose and you graduating,” Naitanui
stated.

“What?” Her heart sprinted as she searched
the cubes for her graduation. “I don’t graduate for another two
years. Do these show the future?”

Rafe meandered into the room. “I distinctly
remember telling you that no one can predict the future.”

Back
to 2014 Austin
had said before.

Rose strutted in behind Rafe. They both still
wore their cheerleading clothes. Their sleeveless shirts showed,
like Austin, they both had numbers tattooed in blue down their
inner arms. Rafe only had two. The numbers stretched from Rose’s
bicep to halfway down her inner forearm.

“We’ve cleaned up the mess,” Rose said to
Naitanui. “Where is everyone?”

“In lockdown at the Shack,” Naitanui replied
as he hit another few buttons.

A woman appeared in the middle of the room
dressed in flared jeans and a striped turtleneck. “I need at least
ten geeky and off the charts smart Timesurfers for back up, if you
ever want the likes of Word, Excel or an iPhone, iPad, or i
anything for that matter in use throughout the general population.
Did you know Gates got 1590 out of 1600 for the SAT when he did
them? Interestingly its
rumoured
Will Smith got a perfect 1600. Anyway, I
can’t watch Gates, Jobs and Wozniak. Mortez has a bucket load of
her people back there engaging them. I need help. These guys shaped
our world. They’re important.”

“I will get you backup, Elle,” Naitanui
said.

“Right. Send them through ASAP. Mortez wants
exclusive rights and access to their technology. If she can’t have
that, she’ll try and destroy it all. Please ensure they’re über
geeky and super smart.” Elle flickered and vanished.

“She’s very highly strung,” Austin said.

“You really travel through time?” Cate’s
brain had reached and passed weird information overload. She
slumped on a chair someone had placed behind her. “I
am
going insane,” she muttered through her hands.

Austin tapped the leg of her chair. “I told
you before you weren’t going insane.”

“Then why am I the only person who sees all
these freaky changes?” Cate shrieked. “And there’s the
Brittany...thing,” she finished lamely. “I could literally see she
had a broken neck and her heart had stopped beating. Then she came
back to life. I brought her back to life.”

“We see the changes,” Austin said.

She exhaled. “And strangely that doesn’t
comfort me at all, but I’ll play. Why can we see these things,
while everyone else remains blissfully oblivious?”

Naitanui rubbed his temple. “We’re all
Timesurfers.”

Cate stared silently for a few seconds. “I’m
certainly
not
one of those.”

Naitanui continued unperturbed. “Timesurfers
protect history from magical manipulation. So it’s imperative we
recognise
when history
has been tampered with. History resets at midnight each night and
only a Timesurfer sees the alternate time lines. That’s why you’re
seeing differences in your world from day to day. Right now you
only see a different reality, not the details behind
how
the altered time line came about, because you
haven’t crossed over into our world yet. My teams travel back in
time and reset things to the way history intended them to be.”

All eyes turned her way. “Now would be an
excellent time for me to wake up or...something.”

“You’re destined to be part of our world,”
Naitanui said.

Cate rolled her eyes. “I personally find the
whole
destiny
thing to be overrated. It
rarely ends well and involves extensive death and sacrifice for the
greater good. None of which are really my thing.” She just wanted
to go home and spend an ordinary, non-magically manipulated day
with Eve.

“Could you be any more apathetic?” Austin
glared at her. “The ability to raise the dead is wasted on
you.”

She gave Austin the filthiest look she could
muster. “I didn’t choose to be a Timesurfer or to be able to raise
the dead.”

“No one chooses to be a Timesurfer. We’re
born to this life. It’s in our blood,” Austin said.

“Yes I get it’s not a career, it’s a
destiny,” Cate said.
Another outrageous
cliché.

“Oh, I like that line. It’s dramatic,” Rafe
said. “I’m going to use it.”

“People will miss me. I have to make contact
every night at six o’clock or an army will come searching for me.
My mum—”

“Spare us the details about your mother,”
Rose groaned.

“Enough.” Naitanui
signalled
for everyone to stop. “I
guarantee you will be home for your required six o’clock
communication. Please hear me out.”

She dragged her hands down her face.
Reluctantly she admitted it was impossible to ignore all weird
things which had happened since Sunday at the bus stop. The damage
was done. Her world had changed. What if she was going to make
terrible decisions or become a horrible person? This was her chance
to find out and maybe change that if she wanted to. “So Timesurfers
control history?”

“We don’t control history, we protect it,”
Naitanui said.

“Aren’t they the same?” Cate asked.

A sad smile spread across Naitanui’s face.
“The two could not be more different. To protect requires difficult
decisions. Ours is a world of black and white.”

Cate rubbed her eyes with the back of her
hand. “What does that mean in plain English?”

“The world wars, bubonic plague, the sinking
of the
Titanic
—are all disasters that
could be avoided in an alternate history. If Mortez seeks to remedy
these types of events, our job is to ensure history runs its course
as intended. We do what it takes to ensure these tragedies
unfold.”

“You stand by and let people die?” A
sprinkling of doubt floated through Cate’s head.
How could letting people die be acceptable for any
reason?

“It’s much worse than that. We make sure
people die.” There was no hint of apology on Naitanui’s face. “We
monitor the past, and when we see a deviation, I send a team back
in time to rectify it. We ensure history unravels as intended,
without magical manipulation.”

“Think.” Austin tapped his temple. “Today,
you woke to a world with an altered history.”

The changes she saw this morning raced
through her mind.

“She’s not the smartest book on the shelf.”
Rose groaned. “You travelled through time with Austin to our
present.
Our
present is
your
future. Your present is our past. We travelled
back to 2014 to disarm a bomb Jonah set to kill a future prodigy
with a prolific talent in nuclear weapons. You got in the way and
Jonah aborted the mission.” Rose strolled over and leaned close
enough for Cate to feel her warm breath against her cheek. “Mortez
has
never
aborted a mission before. What’s
so special about you to make that happen, hey?”

Cate shifted in her chair. “I don’t know
anyone called Mortez. There were lots of people at the bus stop. It
could have nothing to do with me.”

Rose shook her head. “Oh buy a vowel! You
were the only one moving at the bus stop, you can raise the dead,
and Mortez has sent Jonah back to take an interest you. Jonah
aborting his mission is all because of you.”

“Jonah is Zach’s cousin. Maybe you should
talk to Zach? He’s certainly benefiting from this new, altered
history.” Cate felt zero guilt dropping Zach right in it.

“I don’t know how Zach fits into this.”
Austin paced as he spoke. “The cheerleader lay dead on the ground,
and hey presto, up she jumped—freaking alive. Cate healed her foot
and her friend’s leg. She wasn’t affected by the time stop and
she’s immune to Rafe and my powers. It’s
her
.”

Cate resisted the strong urge to put her
fingers in her ears and chant “la, la, la” loudly.

“About the cheerleader,” Naitanui raised his
voice over the ruckus.

Austin turned to Rafe. “Why
did
you drop the cheerleader? You can hold up a ten
tonne
truck for hours,
and to say your reflexes are quick is an understatement. How the
f—”