Third Watch by Anne McCaffrey Read Free Book Online

could read him and find out what would dissuade him and make him think she was that. Simple enough, really.

Chapter 4

    T o think she had imagined that having a sister would be a good thing! Khorii could not believe what Ariin had done—to her, to Khiindi, to their poor, plague-ridden parents, and to Elviiz, who might not be worried, or even concerned, strictly speaking, but would certainly be baffled without her around to bully, protect, teach, embarrass, and aggravate. She was, after all, his prime mission.
    Angry tears welled in her eyes, blurring the colored lights blinking on the walls representing people going about their business. Most of the lights were clustered beside the sea, she noticed. That was odd. They should be fanning out from the ballroom. Then she realized that the lights were in a different place because the people were moving in a different time. So where were they then?
    The lights flickered back and forth slightly but stayed within that small area on the beach. It was not, Khorii saw now, the shore near Kubiilikaan but was farther down the coast, near the field occupied by the Ancestors. A red circle blinked slowly on and off. One by one the dots moved within the circle’s perimeter. Khorii watched, wondering what the circle could be. What had been there, on the way to the Ancestor’s meadow? The spaceport?
    Suddenly, the red circle turned to green, and the blinking stopped. The circle and all four of the smaller lights it contained blinked out.
    “Ariin?” Khorii called, but she could not feel her sister, could not hear her. Ariin was gone, not only out of time but off the planet. Khorii’s father had once done the same thing according to family lore, but he hadn’t left her mother stranded in a time not her own, had he?
    Since this was a time machine, maybe she could get it to take her to the time before Ariin actually left. The only problem was she had no idea how it worked. It couldn’t be too hard, could it? And she could scarcely land herself in worse trouble than she was anyway. Anything would be better than being stuck here with Odus—anything except—when was it that the Khleevi invaded Vhiliinyar? When had they destroyed the timer for good? She certainly didn’t want to make a mistake and take herself to that time. No, if she was going to stop Ariin, then she could wait until she could watch the time device in operation, see how it worked. Meanwhile, she looked around for some kind of signature that would tell her when Ariin had disappeared so that she could judge her own departure accurately.

    T he little gray tabby trotted back to Kubiilikaan, wishing he could have remained a unicorn until he was most of the way there. A cat’s stride didn’t begin to compare when it came to covering distance. However, shapeshifting in the middle of the meadow might draw unwanted attention. He did not wish Halili or his fellow “Friends” to recognize his true nature yet. In this time he was not yet frozen in cat shape, and he wanted to keep it that way.
    Once inside the city, he bounded up the short steps between the street and the time building, then had to wait for someone to open the door.
    No techs worked in the time room today, and the little dots shifted minutely around the screen with each passing second, so the thing was working perfectly. That was good. The device was large and clunky and did not guarantee his ability to return quickly to this time without the benefit of a stream or other watery conduit. He much preferred a crono, but it was harder for his little cat paws to manipulate than the big screen. If he could find his earlier self, the two-legged version, he could retrieve his own crono, find Khorii and her bratty sister, and they could return everything to normal. Of course, normal would do nothing to solve the problem of the morphing alien blob that would probably spread itself like a giant mutant slug all over the known universe, destroying life as they knew it, but he