Erasing Time (26 page)

She nudged his knee with hers. “You should agree with me anyway. It’s good policy.”

“Let’s work on diphthongs again.”

Sheridan didn’t want to work on diphthongs. “Why did you decide to learn our accent?”

“The government ordered it about five years ago. They told Jeth to have the language ready to speak in six months. I guess it took them longer to finish the Time Strainer than they expected.” Echo sent her a smile. “I would have worked harder on learning the accent if I had known part of the project involved talking to beautiful girls.”

She smiled back at him and then felt guilty. It seemed wrong to smile at him when she and Taylor were planning on escaping from this place, from him.

Finally, it was time for bed. Echo had arranged for Sheridan and Taylor to be by themselves for a few nights. “Until you adjust to our society,” he said as he left. “I know you had all sorts of sleep taboos.”

And thank goodness for them. After he’d gone, Taylor went back to the computer and finished installing her alarm-program change.

Sheridan lay in her bed listening to Taylor’s fingers tap on the keyboard. Tomorrow the alarm would go off. Tomorrow they would run away. Perhaps Sheridan would never see Echo again. The thought shouldn’t bother her so much. He was Dakine. His friends wanted to train Taylor and her to be assassins. But when she thought of sneaking off, it still felt like a tear in her stomach.

Taylor turned off the light and went to bed. Sheridan lay there in the dark, unable to sleep. Thoughts tumbled around her mind like clothes in a dryer. Echo. Reilly. Caesar. QGPs. Time Strainers. Dakine.

“Taylor, as long as the government has both a QGP to turn you into an energy flux wave and a Time Strainer that can turn you back, they can strain you into the future, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what’s to stop them from straining us right now? They have our signals.”

“Reilly said he couldn’t get his QGPs to work.”

“He said they didn’t work properly. He never said they didn’t work at all. What if he gets one functioning next month or next year …?”

“Thanks,” Taylor said. “Now I won’t be able to get to sleep.”

“Sorry. Think of horseback riding; that’s what I do.”

“With my luck, I’d get trampled.”

Sheridan turned on her side. “Not if you’re riding Breeze. She’s too gentle.” Sheridan imagined herself cantering along a trail, but this time instead of relaxing her, the memory made her feel sad. According to Echo, horses were extinct. Eventually her memories of horseback riding would fade, and then she’d have nothing left of Breeze.

I
N THE MORNING
, Echo beeped Taylor and Sheridan on their comlinks to wake them up.

Taylor took the beeping box from the side of her bed and chucked it across the room. “Stupid technology.”

It didn’t stop beeping.

Sheridan answered her comlink, happier than she should have been to hear Echo’s voice. The sound of him was comforting, like a blanket you could wrap around yourself. And after today, she would probably never hear it again.

They had breakfast, then worked on reading and pronunciation. Then they had lunch and worked on reading and pronunciation. By dinnertime Sheridan’s tongue hurt from trilling her
r
’s. At last, Echo turned off the phonetic alphabet charts, and they went to the cafeteria.

When they walked in, Caesar waved them over to the table where he sat with Echo. For the first time, Sheridan noticed the number on his badge: 651,205. She felt a sort of smug satisfaction that both Echo and Elise had better rankings. And then she felt bad that she’d even checked. Was ranking individuals so ingrained into human nature that you did it even when you didn’t want to?

She turned her attention to her surroundings instead. Considering how big the building was, there weren’t many people in the dining room. Only a few groups of people sat eating at the tables.

During a lull at dinner, Sheridan asked Echo about the lack of people.

“The size of the room is for meetings and darties,” he said. “Most people don’t live here. The building has equipment that jams crystals’ signals, so while the government is looking for us, we’ll stay here.”

Caesar immediately asked Echo what Sheridan had asked, and Echo repeated the conversation for him. Poor Echo. With all the translating he did at mealtimes, he hardly had a chance to eat.

Caesar cut into his potato, then waved a fork in Echo’s direction. “Tell her we’re having a darty here after dinner. She’ll meet lots of people then.”

Echo told her, and Sheridan noticed that Taylor’s face lit up with relief before he’d even started his explanation. Bad timing on Taylor’s part, but neither of the guys seemed to notice.

Taylor’s relief was because the alarm program was almost to its next cycle, and it was imperative that Sheridan and Taylor be with people when it went off. That way everyone could see they hadn’t set it off.

After the alarm stopped sounding, Sheridan and Taylor would know the doors were unlocked. Then it would just be a matter of timing. They had to find an opportunity to escape before the Dakine discovered and fixed the problem.

Taylor spooned the last of her soup into her mouth. The swelling on her face had faded into a general puffiness, but she still didn’t look like herself, or like Sheridan. Purple-and-green bruises intermixed with her blue swirls. “Will there be dancing at the darty?” Taylor asked.

Echo nodded.

“How do people dance in the twenty-fifth century?”

Caesar fingered one of his metallic eyebrows while he listened to Taylor. “What did she ask?”

“How we dance,” Echo answered.

Caesar stood up and held out his hand. “I’ll show her.”

Taylor hesitantly took his hand and walked with Caesar to an empty space on the floor. He turned on music through one of the menu computers, and there between the tables he showed Taylor an assortment of dance moves—most of which looked like he was being electrocuted.

Taylor laughed and imitated his moves, which only encouraged him to show her more elaborate ones, some of which involved rolling on the floor.

And all this while, the people around the room ate, watched, and cheered them on. People here in the twenty-fifth century apparently had no sense of public embarrassment.

“What do you think of our dancing?” Echo asked.

“I wasn’t sure if that was really dancing or whether Caesar was playing a practical joke on Taylor.”

“Meaning you don’t like it?”

Sheridan tilted her head as she watched. “Does everyone roll around on the floor? Don’t people get stepped on?”

“You can teach me how you dance instead.”

How sweet. He was offering to learn her dance steps. Of course, she didn’t really have dance steps. At home she just danced like everyone else. How would she teach him that?

“Okay,” she said.

He stood and held out his hand to her.

“You want to dance now?” she asked. “While the lights are on and everyone is watching?”

He cocked his head in question. “Was dancing secret in your time period?”

“No, it’s just that …” It wasn’t worth explaining. She took his hand and stood up. “Fine, let’s dance. I’ll teach you to slow-dance first.” Slow-dancing would be less painful to teach. There was less to watch, less to do.

They walked to the same spot where Taylor and Caesar had been dancing before their rolling episode. Sheridan took Echo’s hand and placed it on her hip. She put one hand on his shoulder, then held on to his remaining hand. “This is the basic slow-dance position. Now we sort of rock back and forth slowly and take small steps to the beat of the music.”

He watched her feet and matched his rhythm to hers. “Okay, now what?”

“That’s it. This is slow-dancing from the old twenties.”

“You’re joking.”

“Well, there are other dances: the country swing, the waltz, that sort of thing, but most people didn’t know how to do those. So this was the average slow dance.”

He paused and looked at their feet. “No wonder you didn’t want people watching. It was a silly dance.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“One to talk? What does that mean?”

“It means rolling around on the floor looks even sillier.”

“I wish I could understand your slang.”

She was glad he couldn’t.

Taylor and Caesar were now doing some strange step in which they half pulled each other up from the floor, and then fell back down like human jack-in-the-boxes.

Echo took his hand from Sheridan’s hip and touched her hair, letting his fingers linger on a golden strand by her face. “At least you like our hair decorations. I was surprised last night when I came into the room and saw you’d put up your hair.”

“Were you?” Not as surprised as he would have been if he’d seen what Taylor was doing instead.

Almost as though he could read her mind, he said, “I meant what I said to Taylor earlier. It won’t do her any good to splice into the computers here. When it’s time to leave, I’ll take you.” He leaned very close to her, which wasn’t hard since he was already close to begin with. “I sent a message to Elise that we wanted to meet with her.”

Elise would never go for it. “What if that doesn’t work?” Sheridan asked. “Then what will we do?”

“Let’s plan on it working.”

Sheridan slid her hand across Echo’s shoulder until her fingertips touched his hair. It felt silky, soft. Somehow she had expected it to be rugged like him. “Could we find a way to leave the city on our own? I mean, the government wouldn’t search for us outside, would they?”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”

“Storms, freezes, heat, dust—”

“Dust? What’s dangerous about dust?”

“Shards, crevices, vikers—”

“What are vikers?”

“Just trust me, it’s too dangerous. We’ll depend on Elise.”

Elise didn’t trust him, and he knew it. So why come up with this story about meeting with her? Was he trying to convince Sheridan that he still wanted to help her escape so she wouldn’t attempt to leave on her own? Did he think she was naive enough not to realize she was at a Dakine base, or that Echo himself was Dakine?

Dinner must have officially ended. The remaining eaters stood up, and the tables sank into the floor. The room was suddenly one big dance area, and several people joined Taylor and Caesar in their wild gyrations.

Echo and Sheridan stayed off to the side, swaying gently to the music, while people streamed past them. He pulled her closer and gave her an easy smile. It was the first time she’d seen him completely relaxed since they’d come here.

“I can see some benefits of dancing this way.” His hand moved upward along her back. “I can talk to you. It’s soothing. And your hair smells good.”

“Does it?”

He lowered his face until it rested against the top of her head. “It’s been a long time since I smelled anyone’s hair.”

She nearly asked him who’d been the last recipient of his hair sniffing, but the answer came to her before she opened her mouth. It was Allana. Allana’s long, silver hair. The hair Sheridan had seen splattered with blood on the news show.

More people came into the room. She only caught glimpses of Taylor—an arm waving here, a head shaking there; every once in a while her full body twirled into view, then disappeared behind the other dancers again. She might have changed partners. It was impossible to tell with everyone orbiting around in all directions.

Echo bent down to speak into her ear again. “I did some checking on the computer and looked into your government file. They said someone had interrogated you. Who was it?”

So the government had kept Reilly a secret. She wasn’t about to enlighten the Dakine on that subject.

“Some man who questioned Taylor by hitting her repeatedly.”

“Didn’t he realize she couldn’t understand him?”

“I guess he thought the more he hit her, the better she’d understand.”

“That seems strange.” Echo’s brows furrowed together. “What did he want from you?”

Sheridan wondered if her file had said anything about the QGPs. If Reilly succeeded and made them into weapons, the government would use them to destroy their enemies, including the Dakine. If the Dakine found out about the QGPs and built some first, they would have absolute control over the city.

And here was Echo asking her what Reilly wanted.

She looked over his shoulder at the spinning dancers. “I couldn’t really understand him.”

“The file said you were willing to negotiate with him. What did it mean by that?”

She shrugged, keeping her eyes on the dancers. “I suppose it meant I didn’t scream at everyone the way Taylor did. You know how she gets when she’s upset.”

“Oh,” he said. It sounded like an I-don’t-quite-believe-you type of oh.

Well, what did he expect? He was Dakine. He was probably only holding her so gently now and smelling her hair because he was using her.

Sheridan hated these thoughts. She hated trusting Echo one moment and the next moment suspecting him of everything. She tilted her head up to speak more directly into Echo’s ear. “Do you remember before, when you told me that you couldn’t explain everything, but you wanted me to trust you?”