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Quino and Rosalinda covered their ears as Treasure screamed her way into a
portal, and disappeared, hopefully back home. They held their hands in
place, because the plan was for her to return to this very moment. If she
had listened to Quino’s pleadings, she would be a few years older, and a
little more age appropriate for him. Something must have gone wrong, though,
because they waited for a couple minutes, and nothing. He dropped his arms
in defeat. Rosalinda smiled at him sadly, and patted him on the back. They
didn’t speak. They could only hope that Treasure moved on with her life, and
forgot about them, not that she had gotten hurt, or worse, and
couldn’t come back. They were going to be stuck here forever, but it
wasn’t going to be that bad. There weren’t any dangerous people or aliens,
and the Strongbox was stocked with enough supplies to get them through the
next few weeks. They both stepped forward to admire the view. They were on a
grassy cliff, overlooking the beautiful scenery below, and in the distance.
“Wait!” a masculine voice shouted to them from down the hill behind them,
and through the trees. “Don’t leave without me!” He came out of the forest,
running as fast as he could, and struggling with it.
“It’s okay!” Quino shouted back. “Catch your breath!”
The man stopped, grateful. He rested his hands on his knees, and panted. He
squinted at the sun, and held up one finger.
“We won’t leave without you,” Quino added, “...and also can’t.”
“What?” When Quino tried to explain that they were just as trapped there as
him, he dismissed them. “Hold on.” He mustered a second wind, and started
running again, but quickly fell into a jog.
They might have gone down to meet them halfway, but even though Quino wasn’t
a real soldier, one thing he learned from the ones he worked with was that
the first rule of warfare was to always maintain the higher ground. The
other first rule of warfare was to force your enemy to come to you. They
didn’t know if this man was an enemy, or not, but they had to assume as much
for the time being.
The stranger finally made it up to them. “What did you say?”
“We can’t leave,” Rosalinda clarified.
“That thing behind you can’t do it? I guess I assumed that that’s how you
got here yourselves. There’s no one else on this planet.”
“It only works with a particular pilot,” Quino said, obviously not about to
mention Treasure by name, and hoping that even this wasn’t too much
information.
“Well, shit.” He set his hands on his hips, and looked out at the view as he
finished the last of his panting.
“How did you get here, friend?” Rosalinda asked. “We were to understand that
this world was not populated by any intelligent species.”
He looked back where he had come from. “I sure hope not. I was trying to
figure out how to make a campsite when I saw your ship fly overhead. I
dropped the sticks, and started running right for it. Then I heard someone
scream? Was that your pilot? What happened to her?”
“She had to go somewhere else,” Quino said.
“My name is Rosalinda James. This is Quino Velsteran.”
“Adalwin Tillens. Welp, if I have to live here for the rest of my life, at
least I won’t be here alone.”
“We’re not staying,” Quino assured him without offering him a way out of
here, which should come eventually.
“Neither am I...hopefully.”
“How did you get here in the first place?” Rosalinda asked him.
Adalwin sighed. “There’s this group of people who can do what your friend
can. They...leak portals out of their skin, and fall into them. They can
bring people with them, and I was in need of escaping a dangerous situation,
so I asked for help. I was with them for a little bit before I failed to get
back to them in time, and they left without me.”
“They didn’t wait for you?” Rosalinda questioned.
“Yeah, there must be something wrong with you,” Quino added, thinking that
he and Rosalinda were on the same page.
“I meant,” Rosalinda began, “if there is nothing dangerous on this world,
what was the rush?”
“Oh, they don’t have control over it,” Adalwin clarified. “It just happens.
They have to stay close to one another if they want to go to the same place.
They’ve become separated from friends that way. I don’t know what it’s like
when you do it, but for them, it’s like this psychedelic waterslide, which
branches off into different directions, so you have to hold on and be
careful. Stay with your sliding buddy, they would always say.” He
sighed again. “I should have listened.” He perked up. “But you’re here now,
and everything is going to be okay again...right?”
Rosalinda was hoping that Quino would agree, since she was obviously on
board with helping this man. “Right,” she said herself, giving up. “We’ll
get you out of here, one way or another. Come on, Qui-qui, let’s see if we
can figure out whether this thing stores bulk energy, or what.”
“Yeah, come on, Qui-qui,” Adalwin encouraged jovially.
“You don’t call me that,” Quino warned as they were walking up to the
Strongbox.
They stepped inside, and started looking through the computer. There
actually was a little bit of bulk energy in the reserves, but none of them
knew enough about how this stuff worked to know whether it was enough.
Besides, Treasure wasn’t only essential to the operation of the machine
because she could power it, but she also navigated it. According to
Treasure’s teacher back in her homeworld, Thack Natalie Collins, traveling
the bulk either required extremely precise mathematical calculations and-or
foreknowledge, or psychic capacity. Anyone could figure out how to go where
they wanted, as long as they had the right tools at their disposal, but
people like Treasure had this gift naturally as an extension of their
ability to utilize bulk energy. Quino and Rosalinda were not practiced
enough to be comfortable navigating on their own, even if they could figure
out how to get this thing running. Or maybe it wasn’t practice at all, but
mental zen, or whatever. See? They didn’t even know.
“I’ve done it a few times myself,” Adalwin said. “Perhaps I can be your
navigator.”
“Navigate us where?” Quino pressed. “Back home, or to one of the worlds you
were on before? We’re not trying to go to any of those places. We’re trying
to go to...” Quino trailed off before he said something too specific about
Treasure.
“Salmonverse,” Rosalinda said. “That’s where we should go. Only there will
we find someone who can help. They have all sorts of time travelers there.
Someone will know something. If we try to go where...our friend is...” She
gave him a look.
Quino understood. She wasn’t an idiot. This man was a stranger, and he
couldn’t be trusted. Voldisilaverse was vulnerable to attack. Treasure’s
mother’s home brane, however, was equipped with people who could combat a
threat, including an unknown one. “Yeah, you’re right.” He kind of kicked at
the console, but not angrily. “We still have no way to get this moving,
though, if there’s even enough of that stuff.”
“I may have some on hand,” Adalwin volunteered.
“Bulk energy?” Rosalinda questioned. “Why would you have any of that?”
“As I said, we’re watersliders,” Adalwin started to explain. “And water is
sticky. It stays with you. That’s why the originals can’t stop falling into
their portals, because their bodies just keep producing it against their
will. They think they could be free if they drained themselves of literally
all water, and replaced their blood from donors, but I don’t think that’s
medically possible. Anyway, I’m not like them, but just by accompanying them
a few times, I have some liquid bulk on my body. It’s not enough to
turn me into a full slider, but it may be enough to add to what you already
have.”
“How would you go about doing that?” Quino asked, even more suspicious of
him. “You gonna pee into the engine?”
Adalwin laughed. “No, it’s nothing crazy like that.” He kept laughing for a
moment before dropping into his serious face. “No, I would bleed into it.”
“We’re not going to let you do that,” Rosalinda contended. “Neither of us is
a doctor, and I’m sure that Tr—our friend is on their way.”
“It’s okay.” Adalwin slipped a knife out of his pocket, flung it open with a
flick of his wrist, and chuckled when they tensed up into defensive
positions. “It will all leak from one cut. All I’ll need is a bandage.
Surely this Strongbox has a medkit.”
Quino tensed up even more. “I never told you what this was called.”
“What?” Adalwin asked.
“The Strongbox. I literally just named it. I only told two people.”
Adalwin dismissed it as a concern. “Heh. Time, right? I’ve heard of it
before.”
“Funny, five minutes ago, you were just guessing that it was a means of
escape,” Rosalinda pointed out. “Which is it, you’ve heard of it before, or
you were only hoping that it would save you?”
Adalwin dropped the act, and tossed the knife from one hand to the other.
Quino took out his sidearm, and trained it at Adalwin.
“The blade really is for me,” Adalwin insisted. He turned the tip downwards,
and sliced his own forearm open. It was small, as he promised, but that
wasn’t the point.
It was not worth the risk. Quino would rather die here than put Treasure in
danger. This man lied about who he was, and that alone was enough to make
Quino wary of him, even though they would never learn the truth. He had to
protect his love, whether she would want him to or not. She may never look
at him the same again, but she’ll be alive. He would always shield her from
danger. He squeezed the trigger, and let the bullet strike right into
Adalwin’s lying throat.
Adalwin—or whatever his real name was—reached up and tried to push the blood
back into his body as he was choking on it. A lot of it spilled out anyway,
and dropped to the floor, as did the blood from the cut on his arm. The
lighting in the Strongbox intensified slightly, and the engine revved up. He
was right about one thing, his body had some bulk energy in it. And
apparently this machine was designed to absorb it no matter where it came
from, or where it landed. Adalwin backed himself against the wall, and
slouched down towards the floor before he died.
Quino breathed heavily through his nose. “I’m sorry.”
“I can’t blame you,” Rosalinda replied. “I couldn’t have done it myself,
but—but, hey.” She turned his chin towards her when he tried to look away in
shame. “But I wanted to. Like he said, time has little meaning for our lives
anymore. We’ve already met people who knew who we and Treasure were before
we showed up. He could have done the same thing, but he played dumb. He was
hiding something, and something tells me it wasn’t that he once called his
neighbor a dirty word. He was hiding something big. Big and bad.”
Quino nodded, but still wouldn’t look her in the eye. “I’ll bury the body
and clean up the mess.”
“You can bury the body,” Rosalinda agreed, “but I’ll clean up. We’re in this
together.” She eyed the bulk reserves, which had gone up slightly.
“Actually, you go ahead and go out to dig the grave. I have to do something
first.”
“Okay.” He didn’t see what she was looking at, or guess what she was
thinking. He grabbed a power shovel from the storage locker, grateful that
someone thought to pack tools. He probably wouldn’t have thought of it since
he had never once set foot on real soil until he met Treasure. He was going
to dig a shallow grave to make it easier, but this dirt was soft, and not
too difficult to cut through, so he decided that it was better to go the
normal depth. The shovel’s motor did a lot of the work. When he was
finished, he went back to drag the body down the hill. It was waiting for
him outside the Strongbox, propped up against the exterior hull. It was a
lot lighter than he expected. There was something unusual about the skin,
and as he inspected it, Quino realized that the hole in the neck was bigger
than it should have been. “What did you do?”
Rosalinda was still scrubbing the blood from the floor, and she didn’t stop.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“His blood. It’s been drained. It’s all gone.”
Rosalinda stopped scrubbing, but still didn’t look up. “I did what I had to
to get us out of here. Treasure is a time traveler. If she were ever coming
back, she would have done so already. It doesn’t matter how long she spent
out there, she would be here now. I’m sorry, but we both know that.”
He looked up at the bulk reserves, which were now full. “We still don’t know
how to navigate this thing.”
She went back to her work. “We’ll figure it out. I don’t care where we go,
but we’re not staying here.”
Quino stepped back through the hatch, but stopped for a second. “There are
worse worlds than this. If we do manage to leave, I’m sure we’ll become
acutely aware of that.” He left again, and carried Adalwin’s body to the
grave. He gently placed it down on the bottom, and then climbed back up to
fill it up. He scattered the excess around, so no one would suspect that
anything was here, and even planted a few grass seeds to cover up the
evidence eventually. He didn’t say a few words, and Rosalinda never came
down to visit the unmarked grave. Once they were both showered, they quietly
went back to the controls to see if they could do something productive with
them.
They found Treasure Hawthorne standing at the entrance. “I’m back. Sorry if
you were waiting and worried. Thack told me to return eight hours late. She
wouldn’t say why.” She smiled as she was taking a trinket out of her pocket,
then extended her arms towards Quino. “Here. I made you something.”
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