The Time Travel Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page A

I said, guiding Abigail to the check-in counter.
    The man glanced over the comic, white cataracts swimming across his eyes. “Ah, Kaelyn,” he said with a dusty voice. “Finally, somebody around here who doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out with a stapler.”
    “How’ve you been, Kevin?”
    “They say I have Alzheimer's. Ain’t that something?”
    I winced. “Sorry to hear that.”
    “Eh, what can ya do? Time comes for us all eventually.” Kevin shrugged. “Suppose you’re here to see Mati?”
    “Got it in one.”
    “Well, don’t let me keep you. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He thumbed a button on the desk with knuckles bulging like walnuts beneath thin, nearly translucent yellowing skin. The door to our right buzzed and I led Abi into the ward.
    “That was weird,” she said the moment the door had swung shut behind us.
    “What?”
    “Grandpa reading a comic book. Never seen that before.”
    “Kevin’s only twenty-seven,” I said, walking through a room that would not have looked out of place in a retirement home, if not for all the old men playing the latest first-person shooter—where everybody and the family dog is a potential enemy—on a big screen projector. The constant stream of trash talk into headsets strapped to bald and liver-spotted skulls probably would have turned a few heads as well.
    “No way,” Abigail said doubtfully.
    “Manipulating time always comes with a cost. For Blitzers, it’s physical. Moving forward through time accelerates the aging process. Most of these guys—” I gestured to the room of geriatric young men, “—are in their early thirties. A decade of hard blitzing takes a heavy toll.”
    Abigail stared at something and nothing, her mind drifting elsewhere. Possibly grappling with what that meant for her burgeoning young love, Taylor. “Why do they do it then?”
    “Can you stop yourself from blinking?”
    “No,” Abi said. “But you can.”
    I nodded in agreement. “Most of the time. But our bodies are constantly absorbing tachyons, and if you don’t use them, they decay until eventually your body just rejects them in one big burst. Which can be much worse.”
    Abigail took that information about as well as anybody could be expected to. From what I could tell, she’d known Taylor for only three weeks, but the Theory of Adolescent Relativity stated that in teenager time—where infatuation’s concerned—that equated to roughly two lifetimes. Knowing what lay in store for Taylor hurt, but it trumped ignorance. At least this way she could mentally prepare for the inevitable.
    “Come on,” I said, holding open the door to the west wing. “Let’s go meet Matilda.”
     
     
    Chapter Seven
     
    NOW
     
     
    “Found her,” Maddix said after the fourteenth iteration. “But you’re not going to like it, Kae.”
    “Why?” I quickly asked. “Is she hurt?”
    “No, she looks…all right.”
    An earlier conversation with Zoe resurfaced. A spike of anxiety stabbed me in the gut. “Then what?”
    “It’s best you see for yourself,” Maddix said. “What’s the time?”
    I glanced at my watch. “Twenty-seven seconds.”
    “Fourteenth floor, northwest wing, room 2890,” Maddix said quickly. “You got everything else, right?”
    I wasted no time replying, we were creeping up onto the firm edge of reality and I didn’t want to miss the reset point we’d established. Never know what sort of logistical complication can arise when you do.
    BLINK
    Time slew around me. Molecules and thoughts strained against the temporal load as I dragged myself back thirty-one seconds into the past. A huge pull requiring massive exertion against the nearly solidified reality. Bits of it sheared away, cracking beneath the strain and branching into tangential tributaries of space-time to account for any unintentional paradoxes.
    I opened my eyes to a world painted by a drunk. Thoughts swirled and my legs buckled.
    A pair of strong arms beneath my armpits steadied