I don’t stop until I reach the walkway at the landside edge of the beach. The location Lidia left for me can’t be far. I look around, hoping something will stand out, but to the south there is only sand and more sand.
The view north is not quite the same. A couple hundred yards away, a pier sticks out into the ocean. Could that be it?
“Excuse me,” I say to a man heading down the path. “Can you tell me the time?”
He pulls a phone out and looks at the screen. “A few minutes until four.”
As he starts to put it back, I say, “How many exactly?”
“Um, six.”
“Thank you.”
Six minutes. Whether it’s the pier or not, that’s the direction I run in.
As the path nears the pier, it jogs to the right and slopes upward between two buildings. But I’m not paying attention to either structure. My eyes are locked on the arched entrance to the pier ahead. That’s why I don’t notice Lidia race out from in front of the building on the left until she throws an arm around me and jerks me to a stop.
“Hello, Denny,” she says.
Before I can get a word out, the world disappears and we’re surrounded by the familiar gray mist. This lasts barely two seconds before we’re on firm ground again.
Wherever we are, it’s night, and given that nothing hurts, I know we haven’t gone far in time. Probably only a few hours back to the previous evening.
I widen my eyes to help them adjust, but with only stars and no other lights around, it’s taking some time for me to focus. The crashing waves tell me we’re still near the ocean but the ground is not sand, nor is it concrete like the path I was on. Grass, I think, or something similar.
Lidia removes her arm and yanks my satchel off me.
“Hey!” I say, twisting around and trying to grab it back. “That’s mine.”
“Shut up. You speak only if I ask you a question.”
“Where are we? Where’s Iffy?”
I see her hand a split second before it smacks into the side of my face.
“I told you to shut up!”
My cheek stings but I refrain from rubbing it. “And I asked you where Iffy is.”
I brace myself, ready to grab her arm if she tries to hit me again, but she doesn’t. Instead, I hear the flap of my satchel open, then Lidia saying, “Huh. Well, that explains it. I was wondering why you didn’t jump to where I was. You’re out of power. Which means you’ve been doing a lot of hopping around.”
I lunge at her, grabbing for the bag, but she whips it out of the way as she turns sideways. Unfortunately for her, this puts her rib cage in the direct path of my forearm. I ram it into her, and she stumbles backwards with a loud grunt.
I realize too late I should have kept going and completely subdued her, but thinking that way doesn’t come naturally to me.
Lidia, on the other hand, doesn’t have that problem. As soon as she steadies herself, she kicks me squarely in the stomach. Doubling over, I trip on something and land hard.
My hip aches, and I’m pretty sure I’ve scraped a chunk of skin off my arm, but I ignore the pain. I roll onto my side and tuck into a ball in case she lashes out again.
“Get up!” she orders.
I don’t move.
“I said, get up!”
Her foot slams into the small of my back, shooting a whole new blaze of pain through me.
“On your feet, dammit!”
I don’t want to feel her shoe a third time, so I gingerly move into a sitting position. As I put my hands down to push myself up, one of them hits the thing I tripped on. My Chaser. It must have dropped out of Lidia’s hand when I hit her.
“Hurry up,” she says.
I start to pick up the device as I stand, but she steps forward and knocks it away.
She then wraps a hand around my neck, and I feel a knife press against the skin just below my ear. “Where are the others?”
“The others?”
“Bernard and everyone who were with us. Where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
She tightens her grip and I start to choke. “Don’t lie to me! You said you knew when the break occurred and you fixed it. But you never fixed it, did you?”
“I…can’t…breathe.”
She stares at me, eyes bulging for another few seconds before easing her grip enough for me to suck in air again.
“Where are they?” she asks again.
“They went home.”
“You’re lying. You obviously never changed the world back. Where are they?”
I keep my mouth shut.
The metal tip pushes into my skin just enough to break the surface. “I know you know what’s going on. I could see you were lying when we all met. That’s why I only jumped into the woods. I wanted to see what you were going to do. When I saw that you waited to be last, I knew I was right. What happened to them?”
I counter with a raspy, “Where’s Iffy?”
“Answer my question!”
I shake my head, not an easy thing to do with her fingers pressed against the bottom of my jaw. “I don’t see her, you don’t learn anything.”
Neither of us moves. Finally, Lidia lets go of me and takes a step back. “All right. I’ll let you see her and then you tell me what happened. If you don’t, she’s dead. Do we understand each other?”
I nod.
“Say it,” she orders me.
“Yes.”
“Good. Now don’t move.”
She circles behind me and as she starts to put her arm around my waist, I realize we’re about to jump.
“Wait!” I yell. “My Chaser. We can’t just leave it here.”
Her arm hovers over my stomach for a second before she pulls it back. “Get it. But don’t try anything. If you do, I’ll leave you here and you’ll never see your little girlfriend again.”
Her warning is unnecessary. I’m not going to try anything, not yet, anyway. Seeing that Iffy’s all right is the only important thing right now.
I retrieve my Chaser and say, “I’m ready.”
It’s still night, and like before, I feel no pain.
My eyes, having already adjusted to the lower light, have no problem seeing my surroundings now. There is no ocean here, only a wide plain of dirt and brush with distant mountains on all sides.
The desert, I think, though I might be wrong. Though I lived close to it when I was in New Cardiff, I never visited it.
I listen for the sound of vehicles, but the only thing I hear is Lidia’s footsteps as she backs away from me.
Motioning with her knife, she says, “This way.”
I follow her across the dirt into a dry riverbed. Lying on the sand, pushed up against the bank, is Iffy, her hands and feet tied.
I sling off my satchel and set it and my Chaser on the ground as I drop beside her. “Are you all right?” I shake her shoulder. “Iffy?”
Her eyes remain closed, and for a moment I think Lidia might have already killed her. It’s only the rise and fall of her chest that eases my panic.
I twist around and glare at Lidia. “What did you do to her?”
Her lip arches in a sneer. “Just like I thought. You’ve lost yourself.” She grunts in revulsion.
“How did you find her?”
“I didn’t find her. She found me. Thought I would be you for some reason.”
Lidia’s Chaser, I realize. Somehow it connected to Iffy. Now I know why mine didn’t link with her when I came back.
Lidia raises her knife a few inches. “Where are the others, Denny?”
“They’re gone,” I say.
“Gone where?”
“I told you. They went home.”
It takes a moment before the reality of my words hit her. When they do, she rushes toward me like she’s going to grab my throat again, but I jump to my feet and shove her back.
“What did you do?” she asks, her teeth clenched.
“I didn’t lie when I told everyone I’d changed things back. What I left out was that I wasn’t done yet.”