The Time Travel Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

skip-ran back, the contents shifting and clattering around inside. She placed the box on the table beside Abigail and lifted the lid, exposing a cache of hundreds of shells spanning a broad spectrum of sizes and coloration.
    “What’s wrong with her?” Abi finally whispered in my ear after many long minutes of silence.
    “She blinked back beyond the reality barrier,” I said, watching the woman with a child’s mind carefully arranging her shells on the table.
    “But why is she like this?”
    “Nobody really knows.” I shrugged. “You can’t tamper with reality once it’s solid. This—” I gestured to Matilda, lost in her world of Conchology, “—seems to be the universe’s failsafe to prevent paradoxes. Going back thirty-two seconds doesn’t introduce a significant enough change to the time-space continuum because everything is still in flux. But if you go beyond that, the timeline splits—” I gestured with two fingers in opposite directions, “—creating tributaries of time, alternative reality loops that you cycle through indefinitely.”
    “That still doesn’t explain what happened to her,” Abigail said.
    “There’s something like a temporal black hole beyond the barrier. An inertia that sucks you in. All of you.” I gestured to Matilda. “What’s left behind is just a blank slate.”
    “So somewhere out there, Matilda’s mind is still alive and conscious?”
    “Possibly, but if so, she’s locked in.” I eyed Matilda sadly, remembering the person she’d once been: my own mentor.
    Abigail worried at the hem of her shirt, a question etched itself in the wrinkles of her forehead. “What about the Chosen’s Gift?”
    I tried hard not to sigh audibly. The billion dollar publicity stunt Crask had used to create a religion around time travel had more or less been the thorn in my side since joining Central.
    “That’s quasi-religious nonsense Lionel Crask uses to prey on vulnerable Chronos,” I said calmly. “Reality does not allow paradoxes. Wherever Matilda is, it’s not because God wanted to give her a second chance. She’s stuck in a loop. A prisoner of time and her own mind.” I reached out and stroked Mati’s head; she barely registered my touch. “This is why you don’t go beyond the reality barrier.”
    “Then why’d she do it?” Abigail asked.
    I inhaled slowly through my nostrils. “That’s a conversation for another day.”
     
     
    Chapter Nine
     
    NOW
     
     
    It took six minutes, twelve blinks, and one bullet to Maddix’s thigh to descend the fourteen floors and find Abigail’s holding cell. My first impression was that it didn’t look much like a holding cell at all.
    Her living quarters—though located inside a flying hunk of metal where space was a priceless commodity—were lavishly appointed with glossy wood floors, scarlet curtains cut from a material that looked an awful lot like velour, and an enormous bay window angled out and down to offer a truly spectacular view of the wind-turbine farm above Hong Kong.
    Maddix emerged from the kitchen, his rifle pointed at the floor, eating a genetically modified strawberry the size and shape of a banana. “Are we sure she’s Crask’s prisoner?”
    “What?” I said with enough annoyance to cover for the lack of confidence I suddenly felt. “Now you think she chose to come here, too?”
    Maddix’s eyes pinballed between Zoe and me. “Well, she does have a Jacuzzi,” he said, jerking a thumb at the bedroom.
    “So?”
    “All I’m saying is they don’t usually give prisoners stuff like that. In my experience, there should be more iron bars, concrete walls, and something should most definitely smell like urine.”
    I clenched my jaw and turned without another word. I marched into a room which could have passed for a guest bedroom had it not been for the enormous vertical glass chamber filled with a phosphorescent blue, tachyon-enriched fluid sitting where a bed should have been. I put a hand to the glass