Nomad by JL Bryan Read Free Book Online Page B

night. "So, how's that secret mission going so far?"
    "I don't know what you mean," she told him, and he laughed. Then he looked at her again, in his overly familiar way.
    "Do you still have the amnesia?" he asked, and she jumped. "I nearly forgot that part. Ha ha, I forgot the amnesia. It's from an explosion when you made your first jump through time, right? That must have been nice and confusing, finding yourself in the past with no memory of who you are. Are you over that yet? Are you home in there? Or is it still a blank?"
    "How do you know these things?" she whispered, leaning closer to him. She looked up and down the mall area, searching for saw-toothed drones or security agents in power armor.
    "You told me about it. You and I are...friends." He hesitated before picking the word, and she wondered why. "We will be, anyway, in your future. We haven't met yet. Except, now, we have, and so your future has changed. Does that make sense?"
    "I wouldn't say so."
    "Especially not with the amnesia. Let's start this way: You're from the future. You've traveled back from...when was it? 2063? 2064? Let's check your timepiece." He reached for the moonstone bracelet on her arm and circled his fingertip around the edge of the stone. "Activate," he whispered.
    She jumped again when a glowing blue circle appeared in the air above the stone, a translucent hologram. It gave the current date and time down to the nanosecond, and the map location of the New York Port Authority, 40.7574 degrees north by 73.9931 degrees west. The circle was surrounded by thin concentric rings, and as he touched his finger to different rings, the numbers in the center changed.
    "There's your current location...here's where you jumped in...and here's where you originated, the year 2064. Thirty-two north, one-oh-six west...I'm guessing the American Southwest, somewhere around Utah."
    "2064." Raven shook her head. "If I started out in Utah, why did I land in Kentucky?"
    "Couldn't tell you," he said. "You traveled back about fifty years, anyway, to carry out your mission."
    "What mission?" Raven tried to sound sarcastic, as though she didn't know what he meant, but she had a pretty good idea of why she'd traveled through time.
    He gave her a thoughtful look, then shook his head.
    "I don't want to intervene too much," he told her. "As little as possible, actually. You figured out your mission the first time, so I don't want to change things by telling you before you're supposed to know."
    "What do you mean? How are you intervening?"
    "The first time around, I didn't come back to see you. We never had this conversation. You sat alone at the Port Authority and ticked away the hours until you could finally board the bus to Connecticut--"
    "Could you please not say that?" Raven glanced around the terminal again.
    "--or wherever you're going," he added in a hushed voice, with a conspiratorial wink. He seemed to be making fun of her, as though her life weren't in danger at all. She resisted the urge to throw hot coffee at him. "You went on and did your mission, and then...It doesn't matter. Eventually, you met me, you lucky girl." He smiled. "I'm from the future, too, of course."
    "You're from fifty years in the future?" Raven wanted to think he was crazy.
    "In all factuality, I was born in the twenty-fifth century, in the Atlantic Federation."
    "The twenty-fifth century?" Raven mentally added a check to the "possibly crazy" column.
    "Correct, but let's not get lost down that path," he said. "The reason you and I will eventually meet--the original basis for our friendship, you could say--is that we are the same kind of people. Nomads. Time nomads."
    Raven stared, waiting for him to continue, but he didn't. "And...what? I'm supposed to know what that means?"
    "You always say it would have been nice if someone had explained it in advance. When you have to figure it out for yourself, it's...confusing, scary, surreal, a living nightmare that won't end, all of that."
    She