Nonetheless, when she flicked off the hall light, she said "good night" just as if there were someone waiting to hear.
The Bones Do Lie
Vale was standing on Elric's shoulders, reaching for clumps of deep red cherries on the upper boughs when he thought he saw a wavering in the air. He went rigid with fear.
"Danger?" The Viking might speak bad English but he knew body language well.
"I thought I saw something!" Something like a shift ripple"
"Shift?" The Viking's fingers clenched Vale's knee so hard that he yipped in protest. "Elric turn?"
"No. Just hold still."
Vale parted the branches obscuring his view of the valley. It was so peaceful, with no suggestion of the ripple, like a flood of water on a glass pane, that preceded a shift. And Chloe was watching. Chloe was always on watch. She wouldn't let anything happen to her people. That was the one constant for Vale since he had got caught in a time shift.
He had so hoped that there wouldn't be a shift for a long, long time. That they'd have the summer in the valley and he'd be able to leave the cellar all day long, to explore a region so familiar in contour, so differently habited in this kind shift by wood and meadow. He seemed to spend so much time gathering stuff to be synthesized. The Fooder was great but, after a while, everything you put in it tasted the same when it came out. To have fresh water whenever you wanted it would be great. It'd be good to clear his lungs of the fetid cellar air, which stank of damp stone, fear, and too many people. If he ever got back to his Born-time, he wouldn't complain about a Dorm again! There'd always been light and windows, and warmth and space. Space - that was the other chore that always faced them. He wished that the power cutters had lasted longer. It'd be so much easier, almost fun, to slice stone like fish - so hard to have to chip- chop it out sliver by sliver. But Chloe wouldn't let them go back out in that time. She'd said it was one of the most dangerous in spite of all the marvelous things they'd been able to plunder. She'd know. She'd watched the time stream for centuries and centuries. Chloe was old. As old as Time itself.
"See?" Elric asked, patient, but there was a hint of concern in the deep bass rumble.
"No. I don't see anything now," Vale said grudgingly. The ripple had looked just like a shift. Vale narrowed his eyes and stared down the valley again, half-scared, half hoping the wavering would manifest itself.
Where the city sometimes was, or the little town, or the great sheet of glazed stone or, once, the orderly urban complex of his Born-time, there was only the convergence of the two rivers, peacefully flowing down to the sea. (Vale had been to the ocean once, on a Dorm trip.)
He couldn't be mistaken this time. The landscape leaked and swam. Maybe Chloe wasn't at the window slot. Maybe she'd fallen asleep. She'd been watching constantly since this shift had settled.
"My basket's full, Elric. Down please." He tried to keep his voice calm, though he wanted to shriek out an alarm. If he scared everyone like the last time he thought he saw a shift starting, and it was only heat refractions, he'd get beaten by Steven when Chloe wasn't nearby.
"Mein alzo." Elric grinned down at him, looking like something from a disturbed night, with his lip half sheared off from an old sword blow. Vale dutifully inspected the enormous can that the Viking had filled, his scoop-sized hands red-stained with bruised fruit-bloodlike juices dribbling down his beard.
"You're not supposed to eat half you pick, Elric," Vale told him. "We need all we can get for the Fooder. You eat more'n any of us and you get dam' uncongenial when you're hungry in a long shift."
Elric understood the scolding tone and he looked away, just like a Dorm-mate avoiding the Mother's interrogation. Vale thrust that thought away. "C'mon, Elric. Let's get these back to the cellar." He set as fast a pace as he could, swinging the heavy basket from one hip to the other. It was an awkward burden to lug up the steep slope, and he had to take care not to spill any. Elric, his big can balanced with negligent ease on one broad shoulder, strolled leisurely up the incline.
Vale glanced back over his shoulder, anxiously spotting the others. Would they have time to make it safely in if it really was a shift? Steve was working at the pool below the falls with Fateri, the breed. Teo-somoli, the squaw, was gutting twice as many fish as Jean. (Well, she was city-bred, from a time like his own.) Peter, Grace, and Samuel ranged the stream banks for herbs and cress. Down the valley, more figures were bobbing up and down, picking dandelion greens. They tasted bitter but Chloe made everyone eat them. Except Elric, who only grinned at anything besides meat, or Fooder slabs when he couldn't stand the hunger pains any longer.
Chloe had sent a crew into the woods, too, to trap and forage. She certainly wouldn't have done that if there'd been any sign of a shift. And she knew. She knew in her bones. Vale wondered what it felt like to have your bones know something…
It was a shift! And it was something you felt, like the most horrible, wrenching, vomit-causing, bone-moving, earth-shuddering, mind-grabbing terror!
Elric let out a roar and began charging up the slope, cherries pelting down on Vale. Mindlessly clutching his basket, Vale staggered and clambered on, keeping his eyes on the one thing not rotating, the threshold of the cellar. He heard the keen of the time-winds but if they buffeted him, he was too fear-ridden to notice in the total cataclysm. One minute it seemed he and Elric walked the sky, with the earth threatening to slam them on the head; the next, the grassy slope had turned to solid ice and they grabbed at burning-cold sheaves of dead grass, or lost their grip in mounds of snow-fluff. Chloe was in the threshold now, calling to them, her eyes wide, like blue beacons, her arms outstretched as if she could somehow stave off the fearsome currents that could lock them away for all eternity into that time stream.
As long as Vale could hear her, as long as he could see her tall figure, an orange wraith by the black basalt safety of the cellar, he was all right. As long as she remained there, they had not slipped into another current of time. They had not shifted.
Elric's can was knocked from his shoulders as he plunged through the doorway. Chloe grabbed the giant Viking as if he were no more than Vale himself. The sight of her making the blubbering warrior scoop up the now doubly precious fruit gave Vale the steadying he needed. He found his second wind, tightened the hold on his basket, and forged on. It got harder, for the slope had altered, a rocky face forming where the upland meadow had been.
"Chloe!" Vale screamed, tortured with the knowledge that she might not help him: that she rarely moved from the cellar and he desperately wished that she would. For him. She loved him best - she always said she did. He was her boy, son of her heart. "Chloe!"
"Throw the basket in," someone yelled in his ear above the shrieking wind. He was seized and thrown, arms flailing in terror that the breathless wind of time might blast him into another stream. Then Chloe's fingers caught his and dragged him, wailing, across the grooved basalt threshold. Someone else yanked him to his feet, propelling him down the corridor until he fetched up hard against the far wall and lay, sobbing, scarcely aware of being kicked, of a heavy foot grinding his fingers into the stone floor. He only knew he was safe, that Chloe had pulled him through the door. The yelling and screaming, the cries and angry shouts, even Elric's roar of outrage and the splat of fist against flesh failed to penetrate his hysterical relief as Vale pressed his cheek against the cold damp stone. It was a bad shift but he was safe, safe, safe!