The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 15, 2398

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Marie is sitting on the cot, face pressed up against the glass, not in a longing sort of way, but just because she’s bored. This isn’t the first time she’s been locked up, and if she survives, it won’t be the last. The other three are doing their own thing, but they seem just as bored.

“How long have we been here?” Kivi asks.

“At least a day,” Heath answers, just guessing.

“Are they gonna torture us, or something, or is this the torture?” There is nothing in this glass cell but eight cots, one toilet, partially covered, a sink with an extension to approximate a shower, and holes for ventilation. Under the sink is a stack of these dense granola squares for them to eat at their leisure.

They haven’t seen a single soul since they woke up here yesterday. The light is dim, and they can’t see the outside. They get the sense that this thing was built in the center of a warehouse, but it’s so dark that they can’t be certain of the scope. Surely someone is watching them on monitors somewhere, but they don’t actually see the cameras. There is no sound. Not even the light fixtures give off that familiar hum you normally wouldn’t be able to get out of your head when everything else is this silent. For now, the only noises they hear are the ones they make.

“Don’t give them any ideas,” Marie tells her, pulling her face from the wall for a minute. “They’re always listening,” she whispers.

“You don’t know that,” Heath says. “Look around. I don’t see anywhere for anybody to slip food to us. Hell, one of these bars holding the glass together is probably a door, but we don’t know which. All we have may be all we ever will. This may not be a jail cell at all, but a coffin.”

“Don’t be so morbid,” Marie urges. “They brought us here for a reason.”

“What reason?” Kivi questions.

“If I knew that...” Marie begins, going back to the glass. She stops in the middle of the sentence when she realizes that there is no way to finish it. It doesn’t matter what she knows, and doesn’t. There are no actions to take in here besides sleeping, eating, cleaning, and wasting. Her guess is as good as Kivi’s

“Does this have anything to do with A—”

Marie quickly turns from the glass again. “Shh!” Kivi was about to drop Amir’s name, which she shouldn’t, in case he has nothing to do with it. Or they, rather since there are two Amir Hussains. Swapping them, and freeing them both to different places, was their only choice. They knew it would cause problems, but they didn’t think these people would take it this far. The second Amir was so interested in getting out of Birket that he gleefully accepted the risk. Marie is glad that Leona isn’t here, but she could have helped. For one, she probably would have already figured out who these people truly are, and how to get out of here, and in two weeks, she would be running the joint.

“Sorry,” Kivi says. “I’m just hungry.”

“Go ahead, and have another square,” Marie suggests.

“I can’t, we have to ration it.”

“No, we don’t,” Heath insists. “It’s fine. I was just being dramatic.”

“Yes, we do, and no, it’s not, and no, you weren’t,” the fourth prisoner says.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 14, 2398

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The clock strikes midnight by the time Leona makes it to the lab. She takes her phone out, and checks on the location of her friends. They’re either still at the condo, as she asked them to be, or their phones are, but they’re elsewhere. She gets out of the car, and enters the lab. She and Marie checked here after they returned to the Ponce de Leon in case Mateo, Ramses, and Angela were holed up, or left clues. The place was exactly as they left it, and the security measures they put in place proved that no one else had come into the building either. Even so, she needs to check secondary security to ensure that no one opened the vault.

Once she’s sure that everything’s okay, she opens the door herself, which she and Ramses promised not to do unless they both agreed, or if it was an emergency. She can’t achieve the first one, but the second one certainly applies. They don’t have very much of this stuff left, and what she’s about to do hasn’t been tested, let alone perfected, but she’s desperate. She doesn’t know where her people are, or what sort of state they’re in. If communication was compromised, she can’t trust anything Mateo said to her over the phone. She has to assume the worst and act accordingly. She has to go to them, even if it means placing herself in the same predicament. Leona draws the Existence water into the syringe, and injects it into her arm. Reckless, but it works. She can sense Mateo, quite distantly, but they’re out there somewhere, and she should have just enough power to make it there. She grabs the satellite phone, and teleports away.

“Leona?” Mateo asks.

They’re standing in the main cabin of The Olimpia. Nothing looks out of place. “Oh, thank God. Report.”

“No. You report. How did you get here?”

“I know how,” Ramses says, stepping up the stairs. “You injected yourself with samples from the Bermuda Triangle.”

“I had to,” Leona defends. “I had to get back to you.”

“It wasn’t ready,” Ramses counters. “It may never have been.”

“But it was ready, I’m here,” she insists.

“You couldn’t have known that,” Ramses continues. “Besides, we don’t know what kind of side effects there might be. That is not what the immortality waters were designed for.”

“They weren’t designed for anything,” Leona argues. “They’re natural.”

“Are you sure about that?” Ramses asks, kind of rhetorically.

Leona looks over at Mateo, who is looking down at the floor disappointingly. He shakes his head. He can’t believe she did that. It was so stupid and dangerous, and she should know better. He made contact. He used the proper language to let her know that they were fine. She should have trusted that. She should have trusted him.

Leona frowns at them. She hears a noise behind her, just now noticing that Angela has been sitting in the cubby. “I’m sorry, everyone. I didn’t think it through.”

“It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay now,” Angela tells her. “Let’s all go back home.”

“Where are we?” Leona asks, flipping on the nearest viewscreen to see nothing but the cold dark ocean.

“Enemy territory,” Mateo answers. “Russia.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 13, 2398

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Miller Dennard didn’t understand when Leona called the weapon that one of the other helicopters dropped down in the gulf an atom bomb. She didn’t even have any clue what that could mean, or make any connection between the term, and the sunboxes of lore. Apparently, the a in a-bomb stood for addle, for its function of spoiling life within the blast radius. She’s not a scientist, so she couldn’t detail how it worked, but she assured the team that international war laws prevented the military from using such weapons against humans. They’re only ever deployed to disrupt an enemy’s agricultural capacity. Taba, Egypt relies heavily on marine life in the gulf to support their economy, particularly in selling fishing licenses for tourists. This is going to severely damage their budget, but as she put it, they should have thought about that before they collectively decided against helping a small group of lost wanderers. Heath is shocked that she was able to secure approval for such a hostile act. The three time travelers are valuable, and he knows that, but now it seems that others are starting to agree. People are going to great lengths to both protect them, and get them on a certain side.

The transport helicopter and its escorts landed in Frankfurt, then got them into first class on a direct flight back to Kansas City. A driver came for the fake Amir, and then another came to deliver the rest to the condo, which is when they discovered that the other three members of their group were not there. Angela left a coded note, explaining that they were going off on a rescue mission. That was days ago, though, and they should have beat them back here with The Olimpia. Something else happened, and they needed to know what. They weren’t able to get ahold of them by phone, so they confronted Winona Honeycutt for answers. She claimed that they were aware of the rescue attempt by the Dead Sea, but lost track of the other half of the team after that. No one appeared to have detected them teleporting away, but that’s what the Honeycutts figured went down. She said that she had been searching for them ever since, and have come up with no leads. It’s hard to tell when she’s lying, but it could be true.

Finally, after days of stressing out about it, Leona received a call from an unfamiliar number late at night. Mateo wasn’t able to talk for very long; not long enough for Leona to arouse the others to listen in on the whole conversation, but he was able to report that the three of them were okay, and were making their way home. Communication was difficult, though, so she shouldn’t expect to hear from them frequently. No word on where they were, or what they were doing, but it was a relief just to make contact. Their communications may be compromised in more ways than one, so they’ll wait to debrief each other in person. They sure have a lot to divulge themselves.

“What else did he say?” Kivi asks, having only heard the tail end of the conversation.

Leona frowns, and stares into empty space. “They won’t be back for days, if that.”

“I’m sorry.” Marie and Heath only heard Mateo say goodbye, and then hang up.

Leona straightens herself out. “You’re in charge while I’m gone.”

“Where are you going?” Heath asks her.

“I’m going to wherever they are.” Amidst confused protests, Leona goes back to her room to get dressed, and gather a few essentials. She orders the others to remain here, and not follow her. Then she drives down to their lab.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 12, 2398

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Apparently, the radio tower they were hoping could put them in contact with someone who might be able to help them is more of a decorative piece. It worked at one point, but the locals never used it, and didn’t maintain it through storm after storm. Now it’s so damaged that Ramses probably couldn’t cobble together a fix, even with parts from The Olimpia, or the other way around. He didn’t really even want to try. The more they thought about it, the riskier the idea felt. They don’t have any allies out there, except in the penal colony. In order to protect Amir, and his whereabouts, they have to get out of the region themselves, and they pretty much have to do it in secret.

Ramses decided to keep trying to fix the Olimpia to get them closer to home, or at least so far away from Amir that no one thinks to look for him in the village. He takes this as an opportunity to try out his new lantern as a source of light when looking into an access panel, and that’s when he makes a startling discovery. The lantern illuminates everything around it uniformly, but there are also points of light in various places. One wire here, a circuit there. When he checks these places, he notices an issue that’s contributing to all the problems that they’re facing with the full operation of the vehicle. As he works through it, the points of light adjust in a pattern that he’s had to learn to understand, which guides him to a solution.

The lantern is obviously special, but he doesn’t know exactly how. He’s tried to come up with a temporal explanation, but there isn’t one. Nothing about time and space would lend itself to such a function, and nothing about the advancement of more traditional technology would either, except maybe some very fancy augmented reality. That has to be it, even though he’s never encountered such tech before. The locals of this little bit of land on this island obviously know more than they have conveyed, though it’s unclear if they’re intentionally keeping secrets, or if the language barrier between the two parties is simply too hard to see over.

Marie has kept trying to communicate with them, using body language drawings in the dirt, and demonstrations. From what she can gather, a boat comes around from the cities on the other side of the island once a month to deliver supplies, and occasionally transport people. They could get on it, and from there, make their way to anywhere in the world. This would be a great option—despite the sadness that would come from having to abandon the Olimpia—but the problem is that it’s not due for another two weeks, and sometimes, when the weather is bad, it ends up having to skip a month. Unfortunately, that may be their only hope if Ramses can’t get the Olimpia back in full working order. Even with the lantern, he might not have the tools he needs to accomplish this. There are a lot of missing parts here, strewn all over the North Pole.

Mateo climbs down to the engineering section with a certain smile.

“What?” Ramses asks, knowing that look.

“Nothing. Just. What are you missing? Like, what’s a part that needs to be replaced? A cable maybe, or a bolt?”

Ramses picks up a small, clear object. “This is called a crystalatis. It’s supposed to be glowing blue—”

“Yeah, I don’t care,” Mateo sets the crystal-thingy on a step, and stabs it with his new knife. A blue-glowing duplicate of it pops out of the handle. “Ta-da!”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 11, 2398

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It wasn’t easy, but they were able to get The Olimpia moving. They weren’t traveling at normal cruising speed, but they were making decent time. Three days later, they can finally see land again. It’s exactly where Ramses said it would be. They have to get pretty close to see any sign of civilization, but it is there, just without any skyscrapers or roads. The people who live in Vertegen reportedly like the quiet life, far from the hustle and bustle of everywhere else, but they’re not completely cut off. There’s a radio tower. The team hasn’t been able to learn too much about them, only as much as the blurb on the map can tell them. Ramses is missing some key parts that were lost to the deep in the crash, and the communications system was damaged the most. It’s unclear who they would call, though, considering that their friends are all locked away in a penal colony, and Amir Hussain is hiding from the U.S. government. They would rather meet someone who can help get the Olimpia back in the air, but it’s not going to happen. That’s okay. They weren’t holding out hope for a mechanic who can work on a vehicle that quadruples as a car, boat, submarine, and airplane. They just need to contact someone who may be able to help, and as remote as this settlement is, they have that. But who can they trust?

The people of Vertegen are trying to speak to them in a language that they don’t recognize, let alone understand. They seem to be able to tell that the four of them are speaking English, but none of them understands that. Ever the counselor, Angela takes over the responsibility of fostering communication. She points to themselves—particularly their lips—and says, “English.” Then points to the local, and raises her eyebrows to suggest a question.

The local points to himself, and the crowd behind him, and says, “Rakripa.”

She nods. “Rakripa.” Now they’re getting somewhere.

They learn a few more things as their ambassador is showing them around. He picks up a cup, and says “pani.”

At first they think he’s just trying to teach them a few words, but then he keeps trying to give it to her, so she accepts, and drinks.

“What is it?” Mateo asks.

“It’s just water,” she answers. “It’s nice and cold, though.”

The man smiles, and hands her another cup. “Panijiben.”

“Panijiben,” Angela echoes. She accepts the drink as well.

He gives her one more cup or just plain water, which they all think is a little strange, but who are they to judge these people’s rituals?

He says, “momma” and hands Ramses a small lantern. It’s then that they realize these aren’t lessons, but gifts. This becomes clearer when he presents Mateo with a beautiful knife, and calls it a “kjuro” but much less clear when he smiles at Amir, opens his arms wide, and says, “keri.”

“Keri?” Angela tries to decipher the code.

“Keri, keri,” the man repeats enthusiastically, gesturing to Amir. He points at one of the tents, and says it again. He indicates the whole settlement one more time. “Keri.”

“Home,” Amir realizes. “He wants me to stay.” He turns to face the group. “I think I’m meant to be here.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 10, 2398

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They’re not sure why there was a time limit to literally get through the door to get processed out of Birket, but it turned out fine. They all made it through, and walked across the desert to the Israeli border. It was there that they waited for almost the entire day before transport to Cairo came for them. People obviously weren’t in any hurry to help them. They weren’t on the road for long before darkness fell, and their driver had to stop and check into a motel for the night. He didn’t secure any rooms for them, of course, and clearly didn’t care, so they were forced to sleep under the stars on the beach in a coastal town called Taba, Egypt. Fortunately, it was pretty nice weather, and they were all glad to be free at least. So far, there was no indication of how exactly they were going to get back to the states. Their devices were confiscated from them, and never returned—wiped clean upon any attempt at unauthorized access—and no one in Taba was willing to let them use a phone.

They woke up this morning, all reporting having slept well enough, and made their way back to the motel. Neither the driver nor his bus could be found. Amir asked the front desk about it in Arabic, and learned that he checked out early, and took off. That’s very weird. It’s his job to get them to a special final processing center in Cairo, not just to help them make it all the way home. They’re expected to exit the region according to policy, which entails either meeting their sponsor, or an approved representative, in country. Now it’s going to be much more difficult to do that, and might even get them sent back to Birket. Maybe that’s what someone has wanted all along, and is driving these obstacles. Still, no one lends them a phone.

“How long will it take us to walk?” Kivi asks.

Amir laughs. “At least a week. That’s if we walk for several hours each day, which we won’t be able to do, especially not without any water.”

“Why won’t anyone help us? Do they not have any taksis, or anything around here?” Leona asks.

“I tried asking,” Amir begins, “but just because we speak the same language, doesn’t mean they like me. They know what we are, and while Egyptians don’t have any particular distaste for colonists—or freed colonists, like ourselves—there is some local annoyance that they’re being used as a waypoint for us. Their government struck a deal to make it happen after Israel and Jordan both refused, but regular citizens don’t like it. It’s not the only deal that Egypt has regarding refugees. It’s a huge political issue.”

“Is that why the driver abandoned us?” Marie asks him.

“Probably, yes, but it doesn’t make much sense. He could still get in trouble for it, because now it’s worse. The only thing Egyptians hate more than processing refugees is wayward refugees who are stuck here, and can’t be processed out.”

“What about Saudi Arabia?” Kivi presses. “How do they feel about us?”

Amir looks to the south. “You’re not getting across the Red Sea, and you’re not getting through the two borders between you and Saudi Arabia on land.”

“It was just a thought,” Kivi says, shrugging.

“Keeves, maybe you could find someone to help us?” Leona asks her.

“I’ve already asked,” Amir protests.

“Keeve?” Leona urges, not wanting to explain what makes her method different.

“I can try,” Kivi replies, uncertain of her own skills. She steps away from the group, as before, trying to seek an ally. Her stride is wider than normal, reminiscent of a wedding party gracefully drifting down the aisle. She periodically alters direction, hoping to catch a scent, for lack of a better term.

“What is she doing?” Amir asks Heath in a whisper.

“Honestly, I don’t really know,” Heath answers him, probably not lying.

It feels like she walks all over town, encountering each one of the 10,000 people who live here. She doesn’t get the sense that any of them would tell them the time, let alone help get them out of the country. Amir talks to a few more people himself, and receives the same cold welcome. They’re starting to think that they really should get themselves out of the area as fast as possible. If they tried to walk to the next town over, it might only take them two days. Of course, water and food is still a problem. If only Birket gave them small samples of Energy water as parting gifts, they would be able to survive just a little bit longer. As it stands, they may die here like a flower in drought.

They don’t end up walking anywhere. They just go back to the beach, and sit to watch the waves come in. Marie suggests that they fish for food, which she surely learned how to do at the master level in the afterlife simulation. Amir informs them that he saw a sign back there, forbidding all shore fishing. Hours later, a fleet of helicopters roar towards them from the horizon. “Those are American,” Amir exclaims.

“We better go,” Leona determines.

Once more, they head for downtown, where they find a bunch of soldiers spread out, trying to take control of the populace. People are scared, but cooperating, and it doesn’t look like things are going to escalate to true violence. A woman who looks in charge spots them coming towards the crowd. She orders a group of her soldiers to escort us over. “Agent Matic?” she asks when they meet her halfway.

“That’s me,” Leona responds reluctantly. She doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s a secret agent, and only partially because she isn’t really.

“Miller Dennard. Why didn’t you call?” she demands to know.

 “We don’t have phones,” Leona explains. “No one would let us borrow theirs.”

She’s fuming, but not at them. She’s staring daggers at all the locals. “Follow me. We’re taking you straight to Frankfurt, where you’ll board your connection, like you were always supposed to.”

Leona nods to the others that they should accept the ride. “What prompted you to come for us?” she asks the Miller.

The Miller puts on her sunglasses. “Orders from high.”

“How high?”

Miller Dennard turns away to head for the helicopters herself. “All the way up!”

Leona sighs, recognizing that while this looks life a gift, it only makes things more comfortable. Every person who knows that they’re special makes their lives that much more complicated. Still, they have to get back home if they have any chance of getting back to their real home, so she runs over, and gets in the aircraft too.

Miller Dennard places her headset on as their launching, and turns towards one of the other helicopters. “Put an A-bomb in that water!” she orders.

Horrified, they watch as an object slides out of the other helicopter, and drops into the Gulf of Aqaba. Stillness until the water shudders and ripples all at once, as if a powerful electrical charge had been sent through it. They fly away.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 9, 2398

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Okay, new plan. As it turns out, it’s a good thing that Amir Hussain is such a common name, because there are a few others in the penal colony. It takes them a little bit of time, and a little bit of them breaking into a records room, but they think they have found the right impostor for the job. He actually wants to leave the colony, and start a new life in Usonia. The real Amir Hussain—or rather, the one they’re assuming the two senators are trying to transport as a refugee—is already gone, having been teleported to The Olimpia just as it was coming in to free all of them. He and the rest of their friends should be safe and sound by now. He would have explained to them who he was, and they would have dropped him off somewhere else around the world, given him a little starter money, and returned home.

They weren’t trying to trick Birket, per se, but since no one on the team appears to have actually escaped, their enemies shouldn’t suspect a thing, and they will hopefully accept the other Amir as a decoy. He looks enough like him, given the poor quality of the photo, but maybe there are better ones out there. The Honeycutts may have deliberately made this difficult on them, for whatever ridiculous reason. If so, then they’ll see right through the ruse. The didn’t explain any of this to the new Amir. They’re pretending to legitimately presume that he’s the one they have been looking for this entire time. They’ve almost convinced themselves of as much. Right now, they’re waiting outside of the rundown transition building, which is where release requests are processed.

A man gets on the speaker. “Leona Matic, Marie and Heath Walton, Kivi Bristol, and Amir Hussain, please come inside.”

They walk in to find the building cut in half. Their side is bare, with only chairs up at the barrier, allowing them to communicate through bulletproof glass. The other side is part of a sliver of land where the true citizens of Birket live. A woman is rifling through some papers, and doesn’t bother looking up when they walk in. “Please sit in the order that you were called, starting from this chair here, to that one down there.”

They do as they’re asked.

She keeps consulting the documents, but finally does look up at them. “One million U.S. dollars.” She smiles in a strange way before adding, “each.” Not even Leona knows what she means by that. “That is how much it has cost to get you out of the Birket Penal Colony. I have never seen a bid that high, not even close. But apparently it comes with a...” She looks back at one of the pieces of paper. “...relatively large jug of Dead Sea Water?”

Leona clears her throat to show that she’s not deaf, but doesn’t say a word.

“We don’t like stealing here, but one jug of saltwater is still just one jug. It’s not worth five million dollars.” She continues to wait for them to respond, but gets nothing. “Though, I suppose the payment is more to get us to keep quiet about the whole thing...which I’ll honor. We need to repair and remodel half the blocks in the colony, and that money will contribute nicely to the fund.” She waits once more, but is neither surprised nor perturbed by the silence. “We don’t care if you have any belongings. You won’t be returning. A guard will open that door way down there in ten seconds. You’ll then have ten seconds to get through it before it closes again. Good luck.”

They jump out of their seats.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 8, 2398

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The stranger was just as nervous as Team Matic was, because they were strangers to him too. They didn’t have much time to get to know each other before The Olimpia started suffering from some major problems. They started falling out of the sky, causing them to become weightless, making it harder for Ramses to reach the controls that he needed. He was able to slow them down long enough to keep from crashing so hard it killed them, but they still hit the ground hard. They might have indeed died if they hadn’t landed on snow. As it turned out, they were very close to the North Pole, which wasn’t exactly the plan. Ramses was just trying to get out of Birket airspace. Navigation using the temporal engine is still a little difficult.

They’ve been here since yesterday, doing everything they can to stay warm despite failing systems all over the vehicle. The doors are still closed, and since it’s summer, the solar panels are at maximum efficiency, but they won’t survive here forever. “What do you know about this area?” Ramses asks their new friend, Amir.

“I don’t know much,” he replies.

“Well, are there any research stations nearby, or what? I don’t see anything on the map, but there’s gotta be something.”

“Why would they build anything all the way up here?” Amir asks. He’s trying to wrap his mind around this whole thing. One second they were in the Middle East, and now they’re on the top of the world. He explained how he met Leona and the rest of the team, but they never clued him into all the time travel stuff. Well, they mentioned a few things, but he just figured they were talking in metaphor, or something. He didn’t take anything they said seriously. Now he does. Now he has proof. Now he can’t deny it. And he’s implied that it’s opened his eyes to a few things he experienced in his youth. “It’s too cold.”

“Well, that’s—” Angela begins, confused. “That is why they would be studying it. They would want to understand the cold.”

Amir is even more confused than she is. “Cold is cold. This place has snow and ice. I mean, what more do you wanna know?”

They don’t know how to respond. Mateo definitely can’t explain the purpose himself. When he’s heard about Arctic and Antarctic bases in the main sequence, he has always just accepted that the scientists in question have good reasons to do what they do. The fact that the people in this reality don’t seem to value such study isn’t inherently problematic, though I’m sure Leona would have some choice words to say about it. The real issue is that Ramses didn’t sleep last night as he was trying to figure out how to get out of here, and if they’re all alone, their situation may ultimately prove helpless. Shaking his head, Ramses gets back to work, but has to take a break after only another hour.

“I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room.” They’re sitting in the main cabin together.

“Who, me?” Amir asks, thinking it’s obvious.

“What? No, you’re cool. Leona trusted you, we trust you. I’m talking about that stuff out there.” He looks at the viewscreen, which is showing them the horrid winterscape outside. All the real windows are closed to insulate them better. They won’t freeze to death anytime soon, but every little bit they can do to save energy is best.

“Well, we have plenty of water. As long as we can melt it, we’re fine,” Angela says.

“Not that either,” Mateo replies. “I’m talking about the special water, which is about eight kilometers that way?”

“Oh, Invincibility Water,” Ramses says.

“Does invincibility mean we can’t get cold, or does it just mean we can’t get hurt.”

Ramses narrows his eyes. “Neither. Invincibility means that you can’t get injured. Body water, I realized, means that you wouldn’t feel pain. As for the cold, I’m not sure if any of the waters do that. The pain and temperature receptors in the body are different things. Perhaps that would go away if you combine them properly?”

“Oh,” Mateo utters.

“It doesn’t matter, Matty,” Ramses goes on. “Invincibility water only works on the winter solstice. We’re nowhere near that date.”

“But you’re out of the Energy water that Leona threw us, aren’t you? Every jump seems to use up all you have, but you could synthesize Invincibility water to replace it.”

“I have a few samples left, though you’re right, not enough to help us. I don’t think the Invincibility water would help either, as I’m not sure the Olimpia can make it all the way to civilization in one piece, via teleportation or air travel.”

“We don’t have to get the Olimpia to civilization,” Angela offers. “We just have to get ourselves there. You don’t have to inject the Invincibility water into the engine if you can inject it into us.”

“Yeah, that was a plan I had a long time ago,” Ramses begins, “when I first began my research. The problem is that I’m not a doctor, I’m an engineer. Building the engine from scratch was easy, but figuring out how to bind the temporal energy to our cells is entirely different, especially since something stripped us of our powers.”

“You did it before,” she points out, speaking of their clone bodies.

“I had a lot of resources in the Fifth Division,” Ramses counters. “Time travel is all but impossible here. I’m not working from scratch. I’m working with one hand tied behind my back, and the other only has one finger left, and I’m blind and deaf, and—”

“We get it,” Angela stops him, “it’s hard.”

They sit in silence for another few moments. “What is the nearest spot of civilization?” Mateo finally asks.

Ramses sighs, having trouble keeping his eyes open. “That would be Vertegen, Norway. It’s about eleven hundred kilometers from here.”

“You say we can’t fly, but can you make this thing float?” Mateo questions. “Even if it’s slow, can you get us down there eventually?”

“Yeah, maybe with some help with the manual labor.”

“I can do that,” Mateo promises.

“I as well,” Amir volunteers.

“We’ll follow your lead,” Angela adds. “We’ll start after you get some sleep.”

Ramses struggles to stand up, but he can’t even get out of his seat. “No, I can do it. Just give me a second.”

“Okay,” Angela says understandingly, because she knows it won’t be an issue. Once Ramses falls asleep, Mateo takes a sip of the Energy water, and uses his slightly heightened strength to carry his friend up the steps, and into the real bed. He then goes back to his cubby to get some sleep himself, as do the other two. Come the next day, they start to work on effecting repairs. They’re in this for the long haul.