Definitely Australian. She’d heard that Aussies were a bit on the wild side, but this guy was taking that reputation to extremes. “The only transport I have,” she said, through gritted teeth, “is that Jeep behind you. It rolls on the ground. On four wheels. It doesn’t fly. I don’t own anything that flies. Or uses a start-up sequence for that matter. If you’re looking for a spaceship-type thingie, I think you landed in the wrong century, cowboy.”
“Thingie?” He loosened his hold on her chin.
“You know. Ah . . . hovercraft. Podracer. Whatever.” She worked her jaw. “Can you tell me what’s going on?” Maybe he was some kind of mental patient, on the loose. Or hopped up on drugs, though his eyes seemed pretty crystal clear to her. Besides, neither of those options would explain how he’d done that whole “beam me down” thing back inside her shop.
Once again, he wasn’t listening to her. He was scanning the narrow gravel and sand alley that ran behind her shop. On the other side was a strip of overgrown weeds, then a drainage ditch. Yeah, don’t look at the drainage ditch. Good place to store dead bodies. Namely hers, since she’d just made herself dispensable to him. “Um, maybe – we could get a helicopter. Would that work?” She knew there was a tourist business that operated down near the waterfront, where a person could pay for a coastal air tour.
Of course, they were probably closed now, but he didn’t have to know that. If she could get the two of them out of this alley, maybe she could figure out a way to get free of him. And check herself into the nearest mental facility.
“At least tell me your name,” she said. “I’m Dani.” That’s right , she thought, make friends with your captor, get him to think of you as a real person and not a disposable nuisance . Besides, since her stroke was taking its sweet time in killing her off, she had no choice, really, but to go with her present reality as if it were, in fact, reality.
She looked back up at him, and was surprised to see that instead of looking all ferocious and serial-
killer-like, his expression had changed to one of deliberation. And, if she wasn’t mistaken . . . fear. Or, at the very least, serious concern. Something about that sudden hint of vulnerability, of . . . humanness, gave her back a bit of much-needed moxie.
“If you’ll just tell me what’s going on, then I’ll do what I can do help you,” she told him, not necessarily meaning it, but she had to get him – them – out of the alley. “At least tell me your name.”
“Jack,” he said, but he said it dismissively, probably just to shut her up. She wasn’t even sure if it was his real name, but at least it was better than “Yo, cowboy.” And, she had to admit, a part of her was relieved it was something normal, and . . . human, and didn’t sound all otherworldly, like it had double consonants and apostrophes in weird places.
“Okay, Jack. If you tell me where you need to go, maybe I can help you.”
He continued to scan the alley, then the sky, then the alley again. She didn’t think he’d even heard her, until she felt a slight lessening of the tension in his grip on her wrists. “You can’t get me where I need to go.” He squinted at the sky. “How did it put me here?” he muttered.
Dani slowly slid her gaze skyward, almost afraid of what she’d find. A huge hovering spaceship?
Three moons and a big blue sun? Something to indicate she was still having her hallucination? She almost wished something would.
Because the dawning reality that he might be exactly what he appeared to be wasn’t nearly as exciting as she’d have found it twenty-three years ago. No matter how much she’d grown up. Or how hot her extraterrestrial space cowboy was.
Two
Jack looked at the woman. Dani. “This is, what, early twenty-first century?” When she frowned and nodded, he looked back to the sky. He couldn’t figure out how it had gotten messed up. He’d made the trip dozens of times. More, even. Time fissures worked how they worked, and all the readings indicated that the one he’d traveled through was still quite stable. Not only did it appear as if he’d missed his target by a couple hundred years, but given her accent and the position of the stars, it appeared he was also off by a continent. Or two.
He’d never gone this far back. Not only that, he had no idea where the fissures were in this part of the world, much less where this one looped back out again, or how long it would take to loop in. More importantly, literally no one on Earth would know where the fissures were, either. It would be a good hundred years or more, from this point in time, before mankind figured out how the time-space continuum could be manipulated for travel, and many more years still before they made successful, practical use of the knowledge.
“How did what put you here?” she asked. “Why don’t you just explain your situation, from the beginning?”
He let out a humorless laugh and looked away. “Sweetheart, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
She took this opportunity to slide her wrists free. But, rather than run, like any smart-minded soul would do, she merely crossed her arms and gave him a good once-over. “Sweetheart,” she said, in a pretty good imitation of his accent, only tinged with that butter-melting-on-biscuits accent of her own, “I just watched you materialize out of thin air in front of me. I’m thinking there’s not much you could say that would surprise me.”
Right. Another reason they never traveled back to any date prior to 2297, the year cellular particulant transport had finally been approved for safe use. No point in freaking out the natives. Especially when that wasn’t necessary. Bodysnatchers didn’t have to risk traveling this far back to do their dirty work.
“Be careful what you ask for,” he told her, in lieu of a direct response. Particulant transport was the least that he could surprise her with.
“Why are you in such a hurry? And you look kind of . . . beat up. Did something happen to you?”
She sounded a lot calmer, which was, he supposed, a blessing. Hysterics weren’t going to help anyone.
But her eyes still held that heightened wariness. Which was smart – very smart – on her part. “I didn’t have time to clean up from the last job before diving – literally – into this one.”
“And your last job was . . . ?”
He was still trying to figure out how an established fissure with solid stability readings had gone so far off, and answered her without thinking. “New Guinea. 2379. Native girls are a hot commodity. None left in my time.”
“Your . . . time,” she repeated, and, in his peripheral vision, he noticed she took a step backward.
He looked at her fully, then lunged to catch her wrist when it looked like she was going to take off running. Not that he needed the extra baggage at the moment, but he definitely didn’t need any loose ends running about, telling people about time travelers, et cetera. Not that anyone would likely believe it.
“Hold on there,” he told her. “Listen, you asked, right?”
She nodded, and held his gaze, but he felt the tremors running through her.
“No running. It’s not safe.”
“What’s not safe about it, exactly? Because you don’t look all that safe to me at the moment.”
“Sweetheart, I’m the best bet you have going right now.”
To his vast surprise, and grudging delight, she barked a laugh. “Well, then, let’s hope this actually is a brain tumor, because otherwise, I really am screwed.”
“Brain tumor?”
“What would you think if you saw someone materialize in front of you? Never mind. You apparently actually do see that.” Her smile faded and she tried to tug her wrist free.