The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 20, 2398

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Andile didn’t want to say much else after dropping that bomb on them about the alternate version of Leona. She said that it wasn’t her place to explain. The other Leona’s flight would come in the next day, and they could ask their questions then. So that’s what they did. They went back to the condo to fill in the rest of the team, and waited. The others wanted to come too, but the other Leona apparently didn’t know them at all, so it would probably just be overwhelming. The next morning Alt!Leona answered the door, not surprised, but yes, unnerved at the sight.

“Thank you for coming again,” Andile says once they’re seated.

“Thank you for having us,” Mateo says.

It becomes evident that Alt!Leona wants to talk first, but she needs them to be patient with her. Lips closed, almost pursed, she stares at the space between Mateo and her alternate. “I trust you’re doing well?” she asks Mateo.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Mateo answers.

“It’s nice to know there’s at least one Mateo out there who didn’t die.”

“Actually, he did die,” Mateo’s wife, Leona clarifies. “A few times.”

Now Alt!Leona purses her lips fully. “Well, at least he came back.”

“Leona, what happened?” Leona asks her self.

“I’m going to tell you my story,” Alt!Leona begins, assuming nothing about what you’ve been through. I may tell you things that you already know, and you’re just going to have to accept that, and be patient. I also don’t want any commentary about how things played out for you, or anything like that.”

“Understood,” Leona says.

Alt!Leona begins. “When I was nearing my sixteenth birthday, a friend of mine suggested I try alcohol, because drinking alcohol is the type of thing that normal teenagers do. So I did, and it went poorly. It made me sick—not enough to have to get my stomach pumped, but I had to go to urgent care just the same. I was sitting across from a man in the waiting area, trying to retch into a bag, when I ended up getting some on him. Long story short, I figured out who he was, and went to his house to apologize. That’s when everything changed. I learned that he was a time traveler, but not in control of his own life. I don’t know who was in control, if anyone, but I, admittedly, fell in love. He and his situation were fascinating, and I couldn’t just let that go.

“I probably would have become a film student in college if not for him. Instead, I pursued a physics degree. I wanted to understand what was going on with him. We met another; a teleporter, and she led us to believe that there were others. There was this one other guy too, but we weren’t really sure what his deal was. Anyway, I learned that an organ transplant might allow a normal person to take on the temporal characteristics of a traveler. Lucky for me, I was suffering from some kidney problems, which I might have been able to deal with, but I didn’t want to, so I started to not take very good care of myself. I needed a kidney transplant, and as luck would have it, Mateo was a match.

“Obviously, this process normally takes a long time, but we couldn’t wait for the bureaucracy. Mateo only existed one day out of the year. Through my connections, I was able to find a surgeon who was willing to perform the surgeries under unusual circumstances. Let’s just say that he had lost his license for a similar infraction years prior. This was the biggest mistake of my life, and seeing a version of Mateo sitting here hasn’t helped, like I hoped it would after Andile called to tell me that he was alive. The surgery went bad, and Mateo died. After a year of mourning, I discovered that his death didn’t prevent me from becoming like him. I guess it just delayed it. I only made one jump before I was approached by a stranger with an offer.

“She told me that it was her job to rescue people from the timeline. She said that I was in a different reality completely, and I could stay here, and not be on my pattern anymore. I only did it to be with Mateo, so that seemed like a good deal. Before she disappeared, she reintroduced me to Andile, and I never saw her again, so I never got the chance to ask her why it didn’t work. Instead of freeing me of my pattern, I just ended up taking Andile with me. I didn’t mean to. It’s not like I gave her my kidney too. At most, I touched her during a hug. Maybe you have an explanation for it.”

Leona and Mateo nod reverently, as they have been during the story.

“Do you?” Alt!Leona asks.

“Oh, sorry, we didn’t want to comment.”

“It was more about not being interrupted,” Alt!Leona straightens out.

It was hard for Leona to hear that story. She has met other versions of people before; even of herself, but this one is a lot different. This Leona didn’t spend hardly any time with Mateo, and never built a team. She and Andile have pretty much been alone this whole time. That changes a person. “Everything happened to me just as it did for you, until the surgery. A time traveling doctor did it for us, probably following what went wrong in your reality. Someone must have wanted things to play out differently, so they altered history. Normally, you would cease to exist as the result of that, but when you’re dealing with parallel realities, that all gets more complicated. Who was this stranger who told you this would free you of the pattern?”

“Her name was Olaya,” Alt!Leona answers. “I don’t know if it was a first or last name, but she didn’t give me any other.”

“Never heard of her,” Mateo says.

“Nerakali did say that there were other teams, but I don’t remember if Jupiter did. That was back during his era,” Leona says.

“So, do you know the answer?” Alt!Leona asks again.

Leona shakes her head. “Olaya should have been right. This place doesn’t have time travel, or at least not much of it. We don’t think it ever did. My theory is that that’s why it was created in the first place.”

“You did eventually lose it, though,” Mateo says. “When did that happen?”

“It was about three months ago,” Alt!Leona replies.

“Three months and twelve days.”

Mateo and Leona exchange a look. “That’s when we arrived. We did this to you.”

“You helped us,” Andile corrects. “We don’t want to time travel. We just want to stay put. I mean, we could do without the shady government people chasing us all over the country, but that could have happened either way. People crave power.”

“Do they know about you?” Leona asks. “If anyone would recognize you, then they probably know that there are two of us. And they know that there are two Angelas, so all in all, they know too much.”

“I don’t think they know about me,” Alt!Leona tells her.

“They only caught me,” Andile says apologetically.

“And you’re one of a kind.” Alt!Leona reaches over to take Andile by the hand.

“Look,” Leona begins, “I know you don’t want to have anything to do with this stuff, so we’re prepared to leave, and never mention you again, but I don’t feel like that’s enough. If you want to be somewhere safe, it’s not in this city. I don’t know where it is, though. I don’t know how to help you.”

“We don’t need your help,” Alt!Leona claims, “but we may be able to help you.”

“How might you do that?”

“I heard them talking while I was being transported to the fishbowl,” Andile says. “They’re looking for someone more valuable than any of us. And I know where he is.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 19, 2398

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Leona got lucky back in the timeline that they used to just call Reality Two. K-State University assigned her a roommate for her first semester in college, which was the spring of 2018. Andile Mhlangu was a year younger, but already a sophomore, having skipped the third and seventh grades. Her former roommate was a night owl partier, who didn’t like how strict Andile was with her schedule. Andile was actually okay with the incongruent living arrangement. She grew up with four siblings, so she knew how to study and sleep amidst a lot of noise, and a little chaos. The old roommate felt bad, though, and got tired of tiptoeing around, so she decided to go live on her own. She reportedly got herself a note from her doctor, claiming to have social anxiety, which is what allowed her to secure a single dorm room, despite having missed the registration deadline by months.

Andile, meanwhile, needed a roommate of her own, or she would have to start paying for a double as a single, which is kind of a bullshit rule that the university shouldn’t have had. Fortunately, Leona was there to fill in after graduating from high school a semester early. The two of them didn’t become great friends, but they got along very well. They kept pretty much the exact same schedule, maintained comparable work loads, and had no use for the noise. They occasionally had dinner together, but didn’t know each other’s secrets, or anything like that. They continued to be roommates for the next three years after that. Andile decided to stay there for grad school, so they moved off campus together. Even then, they weren’t great friends, but Leona didn’t want to risk being assigned someone crappy, and Andile still couldn’t afford to pay full rent anywhere.

After Leona received her bachelor’s degree, she was accepted to grad school in Colorado—once more starting in the spring—so she had too move out of the apartment, but she agreed to pay Andile her half of the rent for the next semester anyway. They remained connected through social media after that, but still from a healthy distance. A few years later, Andile paid back the extra rent, with unnecessary interest, after getting a great job at a prestigious laboratory. Then she disappeared; fell completely off the map. There were two theories: one, that she was abducted or dead, or two, that she was working for the government, or some other clandestine organization. The second option wasn’t all that crazy. She was sure smart enough to be doing something like that, and she was in a good position to be recruited. When Leona became a time traveler in 2028, she theorized that Andile was, in fact, a time traveler as well. It might have been true, but no one she met along the way had heard of her, and the investigation ran cold, especially since she was so busy with her own stuff. Then the timeline reset, and the new version of Leona didn’t even meet Andile in the first place. She hadn’t thought much about her until yesterday when Kivi dropped her name.

Winona was surprised to hear from Leona, and not be yelled at about something, but not surprised when she heard that it was for a favor. Then she was surprised again when she learned that the favor was providing Leona with Andile’s location, but quickly realized that it made sense. Senator Morton locked up Andile for a reason, and while the Honeycutts were apparently not cognizant of everything that Morton knew, it was entirely plausible that her imprisonment was for the same reason as the team’s. There are at least three sides to this war, including Leona’s, the Honeycutts’, and Morton’s. How those two relate to one another remains a mystery that Winona refuses to divulge at this time. That wasn’t good enough for Leona, who demanded something for all the trouble. Winona agreed with this assessment, and was half-prepared to comply with the request to find Andile, but half not. She was reluctant to hand over the information, citing a desire to protect Andile from further disruption of her life. The plan was evidently to get her out of town, much in the way a witness protection agency would. Leona has a hard time believing that.

It’s taken a day, but Winona has finally come through, and now Leona and Mateo are at the safehouse. They open the gate for the really tall front yard fence, and knock on the door not sure what kind of person they’ll find on the other side, or how she’ll react to this development. Mateo ran into Andile once when he came to visit Leona that first semester, but that was well after he started jumping through time, and again, this was in an old reality. Neither of them expects her to recognize either of them, but especially not him.

Andile smiles when she opens the door, as casually as she might if she were expecting a friend, but not for a few hours, once she’s finished cooking a meal. “He told me an old friend would be stopping by.”

“Who told you that?” Leona questions.

“This guy. He called himself a seer.”

That makes a bit of sense, but it doesn’t answer their real question.

“How did you get here? Did the seer tell you how to travel?”

“Let’s talk alone.” Andile pulls her inside gently. She offers them a seat on the couch. “I didn’t believe him when he first approached me, but he started out making simple, yet hard to explain, predictions, so I started to believe. I started to trust him. He didn’t tell me that I would end up in this world—there was a lot he didn’t tell me, in the end—but the last thing he said was, once you’re safe in the brown house, an old friend will be stopping by. The next day, I found myself in this reality, and now I’m sitting in here. It’s brown, wouldn’t you say?”

“You found yourself in this reality...in the year 2398?” Leona asks.

Andile thinks that’s funny. “Oh, no. Noooo. It was 2026, just like it was where we’re from.”

“So how did you get here?” Mateo asks, “Or have you just lived long enough?”

“I only spent a few years there. My friend brought me the rest of the way,” Andile says cryptically. “It wasn’t 370 years, like it was for most people. To us, it was more like 370 days.”

Now that is a surprising response. “Andile, who is your friend?”

Andile hesitates for a moment, but resolves to answer. “Leona, it...it was you.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 18, 2398

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Once they received a message from Leona, telling them that she had managed to get on board The Olimpia all the way in Russian waters, Marie asked the others to not say anything about what happened to them. The whole ordeal with being locked up in a fishbowl for three days was a fluke, and it would just cause needless concern. They were rescued, and all back safe and sound. There was no need to bring it up again.

The rest of the team has returned now. Leona figured it was possible to duplicate anything almost indefinitely as long as they didn’t completely destroy the original object. He shouldn’t need to cut a hole in the center of the lantern. If he just poked the base of it, a new one would be born, and they would both retain their powers. As it turned out, this wasn’t one hundred percent true. Possibly as some kind of inherent function of the quantum duplication knife, each lantern stabbed loses its special ability to illuminate system flaws. What it doesn’t lose, however, is its temporal energy. It’s still stored in there, just unusable, like tearing out the processor in a cell phone, but keeping the battery intact. Temporal energy is amazing and insane, and capable of teleporting them to the other side of the world, but it’s also just a really great power source. The teleporter that Ramses designed only works on immortality water, and it’s not capable of processing raw energy. So they had to take the long way around, but they were able to do it in the air, and that was better than driving up into Russia, and making their way over the land to Finland.

They walk into the condo, happy to be seeing each other again. Marie, Heath, and Kivi are sitting at the kitchen counter. Leona starts to get a weird feeling about it. They all look fine; too perfect, really. Sitting there like this, they’re reminding her of the kids in a teen comedy about a rager they threw before having to clean everything up in preparation for their parents’ return. “What did you do?” she asks them.

“What are you talking about?” Marie asks.

“Something happened,” Leona presses. “What was it?”

“Everything’s fine, we’re glad you’re back,” Marie insists.

Kivi is about to explode. “We were captured by some black ops guys, and taken to this glass prison cell in the middle of a warehouse, where they left us for days—probably to die of starvation, or perhaps even boredom—until Winona Honeycutt came in with, like, an entire army, and took out all the bad guys, and rescued us from being electrocuted by a menacing scowling man, who I guess just wanted to cut his losses, because I’m sure he knew that Senator Honeycutt would want to have us back.”

Leona stares at Kivi for a minute, then turns her attention to Marie. “Why are you keeping things from me?”

“I just wanted our family back. I was afraid that you would go back to the Capital, and we would end up being separated again. I know I’m the cause of the latest issue, with the Fountain of Youth. I just wanted to fix it. I didn’t think it through.”

“Oh, and we met a new friend,” Kivi keeps going. “Her name is Andile, and she—”

“Andile Mhlangu?” Leona interrupts.

“Yeah,” Heath confirms, “do you know her?”

Despite his low intelligence, and poor memory, Mateo actually recognizes and remembers the name. “She was Leona’s college roommate...like, a dozen timelines ago.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 17, 2398

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It has now been well over three days, and they have yet to see any sign of their captors, besides the fact that someone had to break into their condo, knock them out, and transport them to this fishbowl cell. Marie, Heath, and Kivi occasionally exchange looks. The fourth prisoner may not be a prisoner at all, but be here to observe them in some way. She doesn’t ask questions, or do anything else to complicate matters. She’s been answering simple questions simply, and generally gives off a vibe of trustworthiness. But perhaps that’s just what she wants them to think. Maybe it’s all a grand act.

The food is running out. Soon, they will have nothing to ration, and will have to subsist on water alone, but eventually, even that won’t be enough. They’ll waste away and die in this box, just as Heath predicted. Marie is regretting some of the choices she made, and she’s about to fess up to them when they hear a noise. It came and went so quickly, none of them is sure it ever happened at all. Based on each other’s faces, something had to have happened, though. It couldn’t just have been in their heads. Another sound; a pop, really. More pops, some closer than others. They’re gunshots, mostly handguns and a few automatic weapons. They can hear screams and maybe war cries too. They’re muffled and still distant, but they’re definitely human voices.

“This is it,” Andile says in a defeatist tone. “They’re coming for us.”

“No, they can’t be,” Kivi contends. “They wouldn’t be shooting if they were just gonna come and kill us. This is a rescue.”

“Is it Leona, maybe with all of our other friends?” Heath hopes.

“No.” It can’t be their friends. After all of her experiences in war simulations, Marie can tell that at least two opposing sides are shooting at each other, and that’s not something that Leona would tolerate. She would come in surgically and rather quietly. It’s not an execution either. What is it? “This is something else.”

The firefight grows either louder, or closer, or both. They hear a pounding on a wall or door that must be just a few meters away in the darkness. Another pounding is followed by a heavy click, and then a second click, which is immediately followed by blinding lights. The rest of the room is illuminated, besides just their cell. A man in black is holding a gun. He is covered in blood, and grimacing at them. He looks around until he finds what he’s searching for. On the other side of the door is another one of those huge power levers, but this one has a cage around it so it can’t be pulled. He shoots the lock off, and opens it. He doesn’t pull the lever down, though. Instead, he pops the panel open, and presses a blue button. They start to hear rushing water, and quickly realize that it’s coming from under the sink. The room is flooding.

“What about the air holes?” Heath questions, assuming that the guy is trying to drown them.

“Get on top of the cots,” Marie orders.

The other prisoner, Andile follows the suggestion.

“No, he’s right,” Kivi says. “The water will drain before it reaches our waists.”

As the man is pivoting over to the other side of the box on the wall, Marie repeats herself, but more earnestly this time, “get on top of the cots!”

Kivi and Heath finally do as they’re told, but the man just chuckles. He knows that the water is going to get high enough to electrocute them anyway. Marie desperately looks around for something to grab onto, or maybe something to hang the sheets over like a hammock. There’s nothing. If they don’t find a way out of here, this guy is going to get his way. The water keeps rising and rising, until it does spill over the cots, and kisses their feet. Marie tries to balance on the frame, which is just a tiny bit higher, but the water gets high enough to cover that too. The man reaches up and takes hold of the lever. He’s about to pull it down when they hear one more gunshot. His head jerks over to the side, and he falls down to his face.

Winona Honeycutt walks all the way through the door, and presses the green button on the panel. The water begins to drain away. She shoots their attacker in the head one more time for good measure. She too is covered in blood.

“Thanks for saving us,” Heath tells Winona as she approaches the glass. “Could you open the door now?

She examines the cell, particularly in one spot, which must sport a keypad that the prisoners can’t see. “I don’t have the code.”

“Of anyone, I would think you would be entrusted with the code,” Marie muses.

Winona winces. She looks back at the dead guy on the floor. “Wait, do you think we’re the ones who locked you up?”

“Who else would?” Kivi asks.

“There are things that you do not know,” Winona begins. “We have been searching for you for the past three days. Once we realized that you freed the wrong Amir Hussain—which, by the way, my father and I don’t care about; he wasn’t our objective—we thought you may be in danger. We knew that the people who actually wanted the right Amir would not be happy about it. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get to you in time, and it’s taken us this long to figure out the location of this black site.”

“Who? Who did this to us?” Heath demands to know.

Winona puts her watch up to her lips. “Bring me the highest clearance you can find.” She returns her attention to the prisoners. “You’re not allowed to know that. You’ll have to commit to us to be read in.”

“Commit to who?” Heath asks impolitely.

She smiles, then looks behind her as they’re dragging a bloodied man up to them. “Senator Morton? What luck that you just so happened to be on site during our siege.”

“Go screw yourself, Honeybutt,” he spits. Then he spits some blood at her.

“Like I haven’t heard that one before,” Winona spits back. “Give me the code, or your daughter and I are gonna have a playdate, like we did in the old days. Except the guns won’t be imaginary this time.”

Scowling, Senator Morton recites, “Zero-nine-one-one.”

“Her birthday?” Winona asks rhetorically. “How typical of your generation.” She punches in the code, and lets the prisoners out.

Morton looks up at Marie as she’s stepping out. “I finally remember how I knew you. Did you ever get your dress fixed, Madam Milf—” He can’t finish his sentence when Winona shoots him in the head, like she did with the other guy.

“Daddy’s not gonna like that, but secretly...he will.”

The other three are horrified, but Marie is grateful. She thinks that she can explain away what he managed to say before his death, but she wouldn’t have been able to if he had been allowed to keep talking. She signs thank you to Winona as she’s backing away, hoping that no one else notices.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 16, 2398

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Finland. That’s where they want to go. Mateo doesn’t remember a whole lot from school, but he does recall a classmate of his once getting into an argument with their math teacher. The teacher claimed that the shortest distance between two points is a line, and she illustrated this using a geographical map. The student argued that it didn’t matter if the line was the shortest, because it wasn’t the fastest. Going that direction meant trudging through thick brush, and over a lake or two. It meant crossing straight through streets, and climbing over buildings. The fastest route was to get on the freeway, pass the destination just a little until the next exit, and cut through the city. The teacher insisted that this wasn’t what she was trying to teach, and he contended that she should be. Mateo recalls one quote quite clearly when his classmate said, “if what you teach us can’t be applied to the real world, then why are you trying to teach us anything at all?” He failed the assignment, and came this close to flunking out of the class.

To get back home, their shortest route would take them pretty much directly southward until hitting mainland Norway. There they could resupply, repair The Olimpia to its former glory, and contact their friends back in Kansas City with reliable cell service. They can’t do that, though, because in addition to it being the most direct route for them, it simultaneously creates the shortest distance between the island of Svalbard and the United States government, who they know they can’t trust. To protect Amir, and all the locals of Vertegen, they have to take the scenic route. Fortunately, they have a way to create a distraction in the form of Russia.

The Republican Federation of Russia bears an even more tumultuous history here than its counterpart in the main sequence. It has been on the sidelines of nearly every major world war since the first one. Funny enough, it doesn’t seem to experience much direct conflict with other states. It’s just been known to wait until the hostilities between two or more parties begin, and then choose a side. Some xenophobes might chalk this up to them making their choice randomly. A number of political cartoons, comedy sketches, and modern memes feature a blindfolded Russian leader throwing darts towards a map, or some variation therein. The reality is that Russia always chooses to back the belligerents whose victory would spell some kind of success for Russia. Russia chooses Russia is a slogan from a certain social awareness organization that is always trying to help people understand this.

The Russian government holds no convictions, and has no strong feelings about any specific faction. They are probably the least religious nation in the world—or maybe just when accounting for its sheer mass. The presidents have run their nation like a business, accepting benefits to their economy wherever they can find it, be it with a neighbor, a former enemy, or even a terrorist sect. At the moment, the United States is its biggest competitor, because while citizens of the U.S. would deny, deny, deny, their social practices are not without their similarities. They would never work with terrorists, but freedom fighters are just fine, and the difference between the two can often be found only in the nuance of personal perspective. So while Mateo labeled Russia the enemy, they are in fact more like a rival, and the Olimpia’s presence within their territory is no more dangerous than meeting an industry colleague for coffee in the cafeteria on the first floor of their office building.

Still, as stated, this is a distraction. If the team is spotted making their way through the White Sea, this will be all that Senator Honeycutt—and anyone else involved in all this—will focus on. They won’t even consider the possibility that they were once on Svalbard, or make any attempts to retrace their steps at all. It’s been a long journey, but thanks to Mateo’s new knife, not as long as it could have been. They’ve not had to stay on the surface of the water for the whole trip. Short bursts. They can stay in the air for a limited amount of time, which is what has allowed them to cross the distance as fast as they have so far, but they’re running out of power, and they need a new tactic. Leona may have come with the solution. “Well, if you have this thing, why can’t you just replace the solar panels altogether?” Solar power has been providing them enough energy to fly for a little bit, but they use that energy faster than it can come in, which is why they always have to drop back down to the water.

“I don’t know how to work this knife,” Mateo explains. I can’t get it to replace the entire panel. I can either replace part of the framing, or an individual...what did you call them?”

“Tiles,” Ramses helps. “Each time he stabs a panel, it only destroys that specific tile, and spits out a new one. I can’t figure out why efficiency is so low. It could be one or more of the tiles, but which ones?”

Leona takes the knife from Mateo, and examines it. Before anyone can stop her, she downs the rest of her water, sets the cub back on the counter, and tries to stab it. Nothing happens. “What did I do wrong?”

“You accidentally aren’t your husband, Mateo,” Angela says.

“What?”

“Only he can use it. We’ve both tried.”

“Well, I suppose I had to try too, given our connection, and the fact that some of that Existence water is still swimming through my veins.”

“Well, that was my favorite cup,” Angela laments.

“Then you shouldn’t have let me use it.”

Mateo chuckles once. He takes the knife back, and stabs the mangled cup himself, which generates a pristine replacement.

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Leona shouts. “Okay, it makes a new one; it’s quantum duplication, whatever. But why does it make an unbroken one? It goes back in time to before it was damaged? How far back in time? How much damage does it correct? What if there was a dent in it that had been there for twenty years?”

“These are all questions that none of us can answer,” Ramses tells her.

“Did you try asking the Rakripa where they got it, and what they thought of it?”

“Yes,” Angela says, looking suddenly tired. “I asked them a lot of questions. Communication was difficult, and I eventually learned that it wasn’t only because our languages aren’t mutually intelligible. They were cagey. They were nice...but they didn’t want us to stick around. So we didn’t.”

Leona sighs. “Where is that lantern thing you were talking about?”

Ramses goes back down to engineering to retrieve it. “I’ve been all over this thing. I don’t think anything else needs to be replaced. What we need is power.”

“And I’m going to get it for you,” Leona says. She sets the lantern on the counter, and arranges her husband in front of it. She adjusts his arms and hands like a sexy golf instructor, or a pottery ghost. “Okay. Go for it.”

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.