City of Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page A

work on it while trying to keep it
from being turned into some kind of weapon.
    The world already has way more than enough
weapons, anyway. Letting governments invent more —especially
time-travel weapons — might tip things over the edge, especially
since we were discovering that time travel was changing history in
ways we couldn’t always see. For instance, the first real
breakthrough in time travel was supposed to come in 2019, in my
parents’ lab. But after a few time trips, the flow of history had
changed enough that it was suddenly being researched in secret,
during the second world war, just like the atomic bomb.
    And just like the atomic bomb, its effects
were widespread, and unpredictable.
    I wasn’t thinking of any of this when we
landed back on that tiny beach, a few…what? Days ago? Or has it
been weeks, already?
    But there we all were—cold, scared, hungry,
tired—huddled on the beach with the wind from the Pacific howling
under the bridge, and me throwing up.
    Time travel seems to be agreeing with me less
and less.
    “Behold! The end of history begins!”
    Somebody was shouting, but my head felt too
heavy to turn around and see who it was. And by the time I could
lift it —
    “Eli,” Thea said.
    — we were already surrounded by men with
guns. And uniforms. DARPA. Army. The same people who’d surrounded
my dad’s lab at the Moonglow winery, up in Sonoma.
    And Mr. Howe, who helped run things for DARPA
— or at least did , until he became accidentally unstuck in
time, too — was yelling at his old troops. Yelling at them, and not
at me. For a change.
    “No! No! You don’t understand! You do
not understand!” After his experience meeting one of his own
relatives in the era of Thomas Jefferson, and ping-ponging back
through the Fifth Dimension, it was hard to tell if he was still
“in his right mind,” as the grownups like to say.
    Not that his “right mind” was all that right
before.
    Some of the guns were aimed at him —
    “Behold! Their swords are still not beaten
into plowshares!”
    That voice again. I knew it. But how
could it be —?
    A.J. Andrew Jackson Williams, the Army
preacher from World War II, and motel owner from that cross-country
drive I took with my dad. And a guy who seems to be getting knocked
around history almost as much as I am.
    How could he be here ? They told me he
died in 1969.
    Then the screaming started. Farther down the
beach, there were people who were standing in the tide, their
clothes soaking wet. They were pointing at us. And at Clyne, with
his glistening-but-bumpy green-blue lizard skin, his torn time-suit
with his tail sticking out, and his long mouth with all its very
sharp teeth, all of which became visible to them when a couple of
the soldiers shifted position. And when Clyne started to speak.
    “Friend Eli, we seem to have time-skipped
from one mammal rumble to another.” There wasn’t even time to agree
with him when shots were fired in the air.
    Ironically enough — and considering how long
it’s been since I’ve been in a classroom and had a spelling test or
done any kind of English or vocabulary studies, it’s pretty good I
know how to use a word like ironically — it was Mr. Howe who
managed to escape.
    He ran into the crowd that was surging toward
us, stripping off his jacket and the damp, torn up tie he had on,
as he tried to blend in with the people on the beach. “Let him go!”
one of the soldiers’ leader yelled at the others.
    They weren’t quite prepared to fire into a
crowd of people, but they didn’t want to let their guard down with
Clyne there, either. “We’ll get him later!”
    Thea and I were quickly surrounded, and my
Seals cap — the one that lets me time-travel — was snatched away by
one of the soldiers, who handled it with gloved hands. Thea and I
were stuck again. More shots were fired into the air, to keep the
sopping wet people back where they were, and then the two of us
were put into one of the vans that