Daughter of Time 1: Reader Read Online Free PDF

and matures fastest in puberty, and I was right in the middle of that, my whole body changing. It might even have been something I could have obsessed about—my changing body—if it weren’t for all the other stuff that pushed it far to the side. But at the same time that I was impressing them more and more in their little examination room, other things were happening to me, things they didn’t know about. One of the first I noticed was my growing power to enter the past. I still had future visions, but what obsessed me, what came out clearly, in high-resolution detail, and what I began to be able to control , were my visions of what had happened. Or, as I like to think of it now, what might have had happened. Like I said, past, future – both are fluid.
    In the dark and pointless hours in my cell, I began to have these long and grand adventures. Journeys into events of the recent—and sometimes not so recent—past. As I learned to control my path through time, with greater skill and experience, and with greater concentration, I could direct myself back further and further. During the first few years I was able to do this, I explored things that were emotional touchstones for me. My childhood, my parents’ lives, my family, important world events that touched me. It wasn’t until much later that the usefulness of Reading the past to the present and future dawned on me. Embarrassing that I didn’t think of it earlier, but I was only thirteen. And I was really screwed up.
    This ability also allowed me to compensate for something that was depressing me—my lack of schooling. Most children would be glad to be free of school, but let me tell you, when they won’t let you learn, and years go by and you realize that there is the entire world of human knowledge denied you, passing you by, you might have a different attitude. I became almost traumatized that my captors had not only made my life this hell but that they had also locked me from all the light of humanity, leaving me ignorant, in the dark, powerless. No books to read or music to listen to or art to see. No new ideas or experiences to grow with. Sometimes I felt like panicking, and I would do math problems in my head or try to remember books I had read.
    And that of course is what connected things for me. I realized that in the past, I had access to everything humanity had achieved. So, I went looking for it, spending increasing amounts of time pushing myself through past visions, extending them, improving their clarity. As time went on, I actually became able to sit through visions and learn from them, like a student eaves dropping in the shadows of a lecture. Obvious places to linger were schools and libraries, but really, the entire world was open to me as I came to realize. Did I want to learn about great art? I could study at the Louvre. Learn advanced calculus? I could sit at the feet of Newton (not time well spent, let me tell you). The experiences of explorers as they sailed to the New World—I could be there with them or riding in zero-g above the Earth with astronauts. And as the blackness fell down on top of me in all other aspects of life, the visions continued to bring me sight. Through them, I could still see, see as vividly at times as I ever had with my eyes. I was blind, but in a strange way, I was not.
    It wasn’t always easy to find these visions of the past. When the visions first came, I did not control when or what, even if they tended to involve things close to me. As my skills grew over the years, and as I consciously honed them, I could dance through libraries of visions, flipping through them like pages in some ethereal book, finding those of more interest, and expanding those pages of the past into a landscape. I said I was unlucky and lucky. In this way, I was lucky – I achieved an education no human being had ever experienced. But I would have traded it all in a second to be back on my farm with my parents again.
    I became so