Most of the jumpers I trailed were like that—someone just out for profit. The agency protected against all sorts of time violations, but that was the most common. Rarely did I track down someone who really wanted to change something about the past, wanted to break the first rule of the agency; most understood the repercussions were severe. `

  Nothing else about the photo really stood out. I stood up and smelled the air, looking for her trail. The scent of a jumper was distinct, almost like burnt copper, and only one person in several thousands can even detect it. The agency invested much in finding those that could, honing those with the skill to track it. Those like me.

  The trail took her toward a large shopping complex. A mall. I smiled. Last time I had tracked someone to a mall had been a jumper looking to bring back vintage clothing. There was quite a market for that. Somehow I didn’t think that fit this girl either.

  As I hurried toward the mall, I decided that it looked familiar. Had I tracked someone to this mall before or did they all look this similar in the past? Probably the latter. I had never jumped to the same spacetime more than once. Store signs for JC Penney and Sears anchored each end. A low flat entrance split the middle. In between, long stretches of stone ran in either direction that I knew would be storefronts on the inside.

  Where was I? When was I?

  So often when following a skilled jumper—and there was no doubt in my mind that she was a skilled jumper—I never knew much more than the scent and the trail, only getting a sense for what happened when I began working on his report. The time disk stored a record of the jumps but I could not access that here or in this time.

  I passed a few people on my way into the mall. Most looked at me strangely. Perhaps it was the leather coat, or maybe the dark pants I wore that were not quite jeans. Maybe it was my height; with my size and bald head I found that I could be intimidating in pretty much all times. I found the women just as strangely dressed. They had high shaped hair that didn’t move in the soft breeze. The men had long shaggy hair feathered over their ears. Pants were bleached or ripped and faded. Jewelry was abundant.

  The trail led me into the Sears. Sears no longer existed in my time, but I knew of it from the histories, had even visited there on a past jump when I needed a part. That was when I found the vintage shopper. A fun case and the kind I almost preferred, nothing like this little girl that somehow kept eluding me.

  I smelled the jumper as I closed in on her in the girl’s clothing department, ignoring the workers staring at me as I weaved my way through the racks of clothing. I saw women shopping, one with three children racing around her, and I smiled. How easy it must have been back then when there hadn’t been the need for a license.

  As I neared, I slipped on a pair of slim glasses so that I could see her skimming trail better. Hadn’t thought I would need those for her.

  This time she saw me before I saw her.

  She skimmed at me.

  I saw it as a streaking yellow line and then she was upon me, kicking at my waist as she leapt over me, pulling on my jacket. I grunted, grabbing at her wrist and catching her tightly. She wasn’t the first skimmer I had tracked, but certainly the smallest.

  With one wrist squeezed tightly, I pulled her toward me and reached for her other wrist. “Time to return, little one,” I said.

  Her face twisted in rage, losing that pixie like appearance. “Let me go! Help!” she screamed. She twisted and writhed, nearly strong enough to pull away.

  I wondered if she had been enhanced. Rare enough—and expensive—but I had tracked that type as well. All I had to do was jump us back to the present and the agency would take care of the rest.

  Then something hit me in the back, knocking me forward.

  I went sprawling, the girl springing free, skimming away in a near blur.

  Shit.

  I rolled over and saw a burly black man standing near me wearing a maroon uniform, tilted hat covering his head, heavy beard covering his face, and a long stick clutched tightly in his thick fist. A look of murder shone in his eyes.

  Some sort of security guard. The girl was smart. I wondered if she led me here on purpose, using the stores security to restrain me.

  The scent of burnt copper suddenly flared and I knew she had jumped again.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said, holding my right hand out before me. I fumbled in my pocket with my left, reaching for the time disk. I needed to track her before the trail went too stale. That was how she kept me away for as long as she had, always staying one jump in front of me. Finally, I could track her directly and I was not about to let her get away.

  “You jus’ stay down,” he said, holding his club overhead threateningly. He lifted a radio to his mouth and pressed a button. “This is JT,” he said. He had a slow drawl and I realized I was somewhere in the south. “I need some help o’er in missus. And could one of y’all call the police?”

  His eyes looked up when someone started to answer. I moved, sweeping with my leg against his, knocking him to the ground. I kicked the club out of his hand, out of reach, and ran, ducking low between the racks of clothing as I sniffed for the trail.

  My eyes caught a red exit sign overhead but the trail zigged toward the back wall and stopped. I pulled out the time disk and set it on the ground, punching a button.

  Nothing happened.

  I tried again. Still nothing.

  Grabbing the disk, I held it up to the light and saw that a small crack interrupted the dull metallic surface. Then I remembered her attack, the direct way she came at me and the almost deliberate kick at my waist.

  Damn she was clever.

  I was stuck, trapped in this time as her trail went sour, until the agency came to retrieve me.

  I had ducked into a changing room and locked the door, stepping off the floor and onto the low thin bench in the room as I waited for the agency. I did not know how long they would leave me here but did not dare stay out in the store. Already I knew what I would have to do, dreading the price I would pay when I returned.

  Through the louvered slats I saw the store security guards roaming with crackling radios. One stood next to a uniformed officer, gun and handcuffs strapped to his waist. Rule number two of the agency was never interfere with local law enforcement.

  Leaning back against the wall, I realized that she had stolen my gun as well.

  Much as I hated it, I was gaining too much respect for this girl. Now more than ever, I knew she had to be stopped. I didn’t know why she jumped, but so far it had not been for profit. She wasn’t a thief or a Paster. Didn’t seem concerned with much of value, just the picture that I had lost somewhere in the scuffle.

  That left changing something.

  I smelled the jump before he appeared.

  Tall and thin, he had a shaven head like mine. He wore a long black shirt and a part pants and his time disk was held in his hand. I almost felt bad about what I had to do.

  I reacted before he had a chance to recover.

  The disk flew out of his hand as I kicked and I grabbed it out of the air. I saw the question on his eyes as I wrapped him in a chokehold, squeezing tightly so that he didn’t make any noise. Not enough to kill him, just keep him from chasing me.

  “I need your disk,” I said as I held him tightly. “Can’t go back to the agency. Not yet.”

  I wouldn’t let someone else bring this girl in, not after all that I had been through with her.

  Once I was certain that he was unconscious, I slipped his sidearm into my holster and peered through the louvers. The officer had wandered elsewhere after taking his report and the guards had dispersed. As I slipped out from the changing room, I saw that a few shoppers had returned. Needing to avoid attention, I kept my head low but still peaked above the top of the racks. With another jump nearby, I had to go to where she had jumped to get the best chance at following her.

  Crawling toward where I last detected the trail, I flipped out the other agent’s time disk, hoping the trail hadn’t weakened so much that it could no longer detect it. If I could still smell it, the trail should be strong enough, but something about it seemed off, unexpected. I decided that was from the agent’s jump.

  I triggered the disk and held it aloft in my hand. Long moments passed and I thought that it might have been too long for it to detect a trail before it finally sounded, a long steady tone. Relief washed over me and I wrapped my hand around the disk.

  As I jumped, I saw a glimpse of a familiar face stuffing racks of clothing into a large black duffel, and I suddenly knew it hadn’t been only the agent and the girl’s trail that I had smelled.

  Shit. Nearly a time cross. Lucky I had jumped when I did.

  Somehow the girl had led me to the same damn store that I had tracked down the vintage thief years ago. Had I lingered, I would have encountered a younger version of myself. Dangerous; the agency always warned of the dangers of having two of the same agents in the same time.

  I emerged from the jump in a park near dusk. The orange sun faded toward a clear horizon and a cool breeze blew. I heard the sound of a children laughing and screaming, and saw nearly a dozen kids playing on swings and slides and climbing walls.

  I recognized it all.

  I knew there would be a young couple holding an infant just on the edge of the park, a couple that looked much like the one from the photo at the bar. A couple that didn’t belong in either time.

  Suddenly I thought I understood what the girl was doing, where she was jumping. Suddenly I realized that I had already reclaimed the girl once.

  Her trail was still strong here and I smelled the bitter scent of her jump. I backed up along the outer edge of the park, fading into tall trees that were no longer found in my city, and waited.

  There was a flicker of motion nearby and I slipped toward it, careful to not make any sudden movements. I knew where her attention would be focused.

  I saw her standing next to a tree. She wore jeans and a long shirt, her hair now blond again and still short. In another setting I would think her cute.

  She would look much like the woman holding the baby.

  I grabbed her wrist before she could see me and skim. Or jump.

  She turned, her eyes wide, and I pulled her back against the tree, cupping my hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream. The dusk provided protection from outside eyes.

  “They’re not licensed,” I said. “Jumping didn’t make what they did right.”

  Her blue eyes were hard and hot and looked as if she could tear me apart. She tried biting my hand but I cupped it away.

  “Can’t stop this. Can’t change the past. We don’t know what would happen.”

  She struggled to say something and I moved my hand, holding it cautiously in case she tried to scream again.

  “It’s my past,” she grunted. Her voice sounded young and soft but her eyes were dark and angry.

  I sighed, hating that she might be right. “Still can’t change it.” That was the first rule.

  “Who would it hurt to leave me here?” she asked.

  Her eyes looked past me and I followed where she looked, toward where her parents followed another couple as they stood from a bench and turned up the street, walking hand in hand. I knew what happened next. Had been there for it.

  “I don’t know what it would hurt,” I answered. “Questions like that are for the agency to answer.” Her eyes flashed with rage at the mention of the agency. I felt her strain, struggling again to get away. “That’s the problem with jumpers like you that want to change the past. You never think about the consequences.”

  Icy eyes flicked back to me and I nearly withered.

  “What about the consequences of leaving me there, in that time? What about what happens to me then? I would be better here. Life would have been better.”

  I pulled out the borrowed time disk and pressed a single button on the bottom. Her eyes begged me to let her go but I knew what she would do. Holding her here was self-preservation as much as following the first rule.

  I knew without looking that a bald agent wearing a dark leather coat and dark pants approached the couple, steering them away from the park to return them to their time.

  Just as I prepared to again return the girl to her time. My time.

  “Can’t change the past,” I said as the jump started to envelop us. “Only your future.”

  Then we jumped.

  A Life in Flashes

  I smelled the sickness clinging to me as it had since I was first diagnosed, the cancer eating away at my stomach. Darkness surrounded me, only glimmers of shadows shifting through the blackness. Sounds echoed around me, muted and dull, and I struggled to recognize the steady beeping I heard over everything. Voices murmured nearby but none spoke to me.

  Nothing could be done but delay the inevitable. Long ago, I elected to forgo the chemo and the sickness I knew would come with it, the same sickness I watched Allison go through as the breast cancer ripped through her. Of course she had done it for me—always for me—thinking to prolong our time together, months spent watching her lose her hair and appetite, hovering over the toilet as the retching overwhelmed her, until finally she was able to rest. Now I would join her in the afterlife. After the pain I had been through, I was ready.

  Someone grabbed my hand and my delirious mind wondered if it was Rachel or Nick before deciding that it would be neither. Rachel had receded after her mother died, disappearing into some dark depression like a slug avoiding the light. Nick…I knew I would not see Nick again, not even in the afterlife.

  “Ray,” someone said, squeezing my hand.

  I squeezed back or tried to. Not much strength remained. I couldn’t even open my eyes any longer.

  “Ray! Are you still with us?”

  Attempts to speak failed so I tried to move my head.

  “Good,” the voice said. I heard the relief in the words. “There’s something we need you to do before you go. Just one thing…”

  I listened, a knot forming in my stomach as I did. Then the beeping stopped.

  I blinked open my eyes and looked around. The room was dark but traces of familiar sunlight slipped through the slats of bamboo shades pulled down along the windows. A ceiling fan twirled lazily overhead, soft breeze of stale air breathing on my cheeks reminded me of waking every morning next to Allison.

  I jerked my head over and saw her lumpy shape in the ocean blue sheets, sheets she just had to get since they matched the paint she loved so much. I swallowed back the lump in my throat as I leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek. She stirred slightly, rolling over so that I could just see the edges of her face, and I kissed her again, this time on the lips, ignoring her stale morning breath.

  Dreaming. I was dreaming.

  Or dead.

  As I looked around, I saw that this was our room just as it had been, only years earlier. Before the sickness and the cancer had stolen her from me. Before Rachel had disappeared, receding so that she was almost as dead as her mother. Before the trial, before Nick had…

  The thought caught in my throat as a memory returned. I was dying. I remembered the stench of my sickness, remembered the steady beeping of the monitor next to me as I lay in the hospice bed, and remembered the strange and urgent request.

  I leapt out of bed with energy I had not had in many years. Not a dream and not dead—not yet—but something different, an unexpected chance to set something right. I didn’t know how much time I had here, how much time remaining, only that they had told me that in these final moments, moments that normally flashed by as you died, I could step off briefly into my past. Time would stretch out, they said, but only for so long. Maybe—just maybe—it would be long enough for an opportunity, long enough for a chance to make a change.

  I didn’t know if there was any significance to where I stepped off, only that my time at the stop was limited. Linger too long and I would be pulled away, missing a period of flashes. Linger long enough, and everything would fade.

  Hurrying toward the faded white door that I never had a chance to refinish, I hesitated and turned back to Allison. This would be a much better last memory of her than the one I had, the one where the cancer and the chemo ate the flesh from her bones, her face sunken and hollow so that she looked more dead than alive, her hair only thin wisps…

  I looked at her face, held her in my eyes for only a moment, and brushed the strands of hair off her face, kissing her again.

  Tears streamed down my cheeks as I hurried down the stairs. Blurry pictures lined the staircase, snapshots of the kids and our family taken over the years, pictures that still hung in our house. I wondered who would take them down when I was gone?

  As I reached the bottom of the stairs, the door opened and Nick entered. I froze on the stairs, watching him, looking so much like the man I last saw, but different too. There was not the anger—the indifference—that would be there later. Large aviator sunglasses covered his eyes, his hair was short cropped and combed over, and he wore a baggy sweatshirt with DSU written in faded letters across the front. Now tall and solidly built, he served as a reminder of myself from years ago, so different than the scrawny teenager he once had been. How had we turned out so differently?

  College still, before all the messiness, back when Allison and I were simply thrilled that he seemed to have emerged from his difficult phase, never minding the fact that he rarely smiled. Only the barbed piercing through his eyebrow just visible over the top of his sunglasses served as a reminder of those times.

  Even now I still saw him as he once was, the quiet child, our first born.

  He glanced over at me and said nothing, closing the door silently. For a moment, I thought this just a memory, a dying man’s wish to see his son one more time.

  “Nick,” I said his name with as much warmth as I could muster.

  The images at his trial had challenged my love, images so graphic and brutal that I could not bear to watch. Thankfully Allison had been too sick for court by that time, always able to believe her son’s innocence. The trial had disabused me of that, seeing the faces of the women he had killed and brutalized, the flat way he had stared ahead during the trial, the lack of remorse on his face. Always I wondered what those girls’ fathers must feel, the sense of loss and the anger.

 

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