The Time Travel Chronicles by Robert J. Sawyer, Stefan Bolz, Ann Christy, Samuel Peralta, Rysa Walker, Lucas Bale, Anthony Vicino, Ernie Lindsey, Carol Davis, Tracy Banghart, Michael Holden, Daniel Arthur Smith, Ernie Luis, Erik Wecks Read Free Book Online

there was so much blood and it was so hot. It burned. I was falling down this bottomless pit inside myself, Kae. I couldn’t control it. You never taught me how to control something like that.”
    Abigail paused, her chest heaving with the remembrance of raw pain still so fresh. “My body kept blinking back; four seconds each time. Right before the gunshot. I relived that moment over and over and over…If only I could have gone one second further—” Abi held up a single trembling finger, “—I could have shoved him out of the way.”
    Abi’s confession tore at me. I hadn’t realized how badly she’d been hurt that night. Perhaps part of me hadn’t wanted to know. Hadn’t wanted to carry the burden of that knowledge.
    “Eventually I just cracked. I broke.” Abigail looked up, her pupils were flaring spheres of sapphire. “I was too weak to save him. But not anymore.”
    Rivulets of tachyon-enriched fluid dripped from her hair. Falling slowly in thick droplets. Zoe was right, she hadn’t been taken—she’d come to Crask to change the past.
    “Abi, you can’t do it. You can’t go back.”
    “Why not?” she said defiantly.
    “Because it’s an infinite loop.”
    “That’s what you say, but you could be wrong. Crask says you’re wrong.”
    “He’s using you. You know that!”
    “Honestly, it doesn’t even matter,” Abigail said. She suddenly seemed so old, so tired. “It can’t be any worse than staying. At least this way I’ll get to see him again.”
    “Please, Abi,” I pleaded, desperate to find the right combination of words that would make her see reason. “Don’t do this—”
    “Sorry about your ribs, Maddix.”
    Maddix made a noise not unlike a chuckle.
    “I’m sorry for all of this. I knew you guys would try and stop me, but I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. You’re all family.”
    My mouth moved but nothing came out.
    Abigail smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen her wear. “Goodbye, Kae.” And then she shoved Zoe away.
    The smile vanished along with the light in her eyes in an instant. Abigail stood as still as a mannequin, her eyes scanning, wide and suddenly frightened. The blue fire had been quenched, her tachyons used up in a single massive blink. No sign of her once fierce intelligence, or the heart so innocent it could only break beneath the strain of a world too cruel.
    All that remained was the shell of a friend and a past I couldn’t fix.
     
     
    Chapter Fourteen
     
    NOW
     
     
    “Get up, Maddix. We’re leaving,” Zoe said, striding to the door through which we’d entered. It was locked. “Shit.”
    I stared numbly at Abigail’s vacant expression, swimming through thoughts of how I’d failed her. Zoe shook me hard.
    “Kae, I need you,” she said. “Don’t fall apart on me, okay?”
    I nodded slowly, forcing away the thoughts of Abigail holding me paralyzed.
    Lionel Crask’s overly enunciated voice piped into the room via invisible speakers. “Agent Kwon, you and your team are no longer welcome here.”
    “Were we ever?” Maddix said, grunting to his feet and clutching his ribs.
    “Young Abigail requested an opportunity to say goodbye face to face,” Crask said. “Your presence has fulfilled that contractual obligation. Now I would like you to leave.”
    “You went too far, Crask,” I said through gritted teeth. “Abigail was emotionally unstable. You took advantage of that. You killed her.”
    “She and I had a business arrangement; she wanted to go back and I needed another blinker. We both got what we wanted.”
    “You handed her a loaded gun.”
    “Yes, I did,” Crask agreed. “I gave her the strength to claim her legacy. To become mo-”
    “Save your proselytizing for someone who’ll actually buy it. You’re just a power hungry thug preying on the vulnerable.”
    “Every ecosystem has a predator, I suppose,” he said unapologetically.
    I shook my head, frustrated not so much with Crask and what he’d done, but with