City of Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page B

of history — we never knew which room we’d
be in next.
    “That was not you.” She reached out and
touched my face with her fingers. “Tiberius would have taken my
mother from me, regardless. His mob would have burned Alexandria,
either way. And if you hadn’t come along, he would have taken me,
too. You saved my life.”
    I didn’t know what to say. I just felt kind
of funny all over. We rode the rest of the way sitting next to each
other — not cuddling or anything like that — just being quiet,
looking out the tiny patch of window that was all we had to make
sense of the world.
    It didn’t seem to be Christmas, or even
winter, as far as I could tell. It looked like summer. But of
course, weather no longer worked in predictable “seasons,” like it
did in the old days, so you could never be sure.
     
    People weren’t off the streets because there
was a holiday, it turns out. They were all indoors because there’d
been a quarantine. For slow pox.
    I found out during one of those debriefings
in the DARPA tunnels. There was no Comnet in the bare, bright room
they first took me to, and I had to pay attention to Thirty. But
this particular “debrief” was better than the others, because they
brought Thea with them. I think maybe they thought if they did
something like that, Thea and I would lighten up and start chatting
away, and we could all be friends
    “You’ve been away for a few months and things
have gotten worse here,” Thirty said, thinking maybe she’d try her
version of “helpful.” “Problems with the weather, wars still
breaking out, someone somewhere always angry about something,
bombing someone else. And on top of everything else, there’s this
plague. Thank God it’s slow pox. If it spread any faster, I don’t
think we could manage.”
    “Managing” consisted of keeping people
inside, mostly. So I guess, in that sense, being stuck in the DARPA
tunnels made Thea and I a lot like “normal” teenage kids in the
year 2020, who weren’t getting out much. Thirty said something
about the government letting people out to shop once in a while,
but mostly keeping them apart so they wouldn’t keep infecting each
other.
    Even though I knew slow pox was bad, I didn’t
think it was that easy to catch. Maybe I was wrong.
    “So what do you want from Eli and me?” Thea
asked her. A translator repeated the question to Thirty — who was
not expecting either of us to start asking her questions at
all.
    “Well, that’s it, isn’t it, my little time
travelers? What do we do with you when all of history seems to be
unraveling at once?”
    “Why do you have to do anything at all?” I
asked back. “Why not just let us go home?”
    “And where is ‘home,’ for the little
time travelers?” she wondered, with a hard little smile. Now it was
Thea’s turn to ask something.
    “And what of our friend K’lion? Will you be
bringing him in here, soon, too?”
    I always kind of liked the way she pronounced
Clyne’s name.
    “Ah, Mr. Klein. Yes. You have to understand,
not everyone is as… used to his presence, as the two of you
appear to be.”
    “What does that mean?” I asked.
    She never answered. She didn’t seem to like
how this was going, and said, “We’ll show you to your rooms now.”
That was the last time I saw Thea.
    After that, Thirty started taking me to the
cafeteria with her, or at least she’d meet me there, in another
attempt to be “friendly,” or maybe in a pitiful attempt to make up
for Thea’s absence.
    One time the two Twenty-Fives came to bring
me to the cafeteria and I overheard them talking about Mr. Howe.
They said he’d gone “off the reservation,” and at first, I wondered
if they were talking about the Mandan village I’d been to with the
Corps of Discovery. But then when they said, “He’s out there saying
crazy things,” I figured it meant he was doing some stuff they
didn’t officially approve of.
    That’s when they realized I was listening and
they