Excerpt: timestream

She found it on the bus.

It was while she was on her way home after school, after a long, terrible, brilliant day when she didn’t know if she ought to laugh or to cry or to do nothing at all. She sat down, mind still spinning, and there it was, just sitting on the floor. She picked it up, looked for a name, stood up and asked around.

“Is anyone missing a journal?” None of the other eighteen passengers did more than glance up at her. Most didn’t even do that. She sat back down and inspected it more thoroughly.

It was well-used, the size of a small hardback book, and covered with a faded paper printed with a once-bright paisley pattern. Despite being slightly damp from the puddles of December downpour on the floor, it didn’t seem to be damaged at all. Opening it, she found pages upon pages filled with curly woman’s handwriting.

Then she snapped it shut. This was wrong. She shouldn’t be looking at this. This was probably someone’s personal journal, their private thoughts. It would be rude to pry.

But still…

She opened it back up. She’d just read a few sentences, and then she’d stop. Give it to the bus driver so that the owner might be able to get it back.

She started reading.

***

It’s not like I asked to be who I am.

It’s just something you’re born with, like a great singing voice or big feet. Only my thing is potentially life-threatening, can’t be ignored, and is currently considered physically impossible.

We found out when I was three. My mom had left the room for just a minute, and when she came back, my tape player had been replaced by an old radio. A few days later, she found me crawling furiously towards a euro from 2631. And then there was the third sign.

The Guild says you should always watch for the third sign. One sign and it could be just one of those things. These things actually happen fairly often—someone sweeps through your area and time zone, and you find some old clothes you can’t remember ever having before. Two signs and maybe it’s just a coincidence. But three signs, they say, and it’s a surefire thing. There’s never been a report of a three sign false alarm. (Then again, this sort of thing tends to run in families, so most of the time if someone notices three signs, it’s likely anyway.) What’s more, some of the older Members—and I mean real old, not caught in a loop old—say that the third sign is what tells how you’ll be. If you have a box as your third sign, you’ll have trouble keeping track of the times. If you have a dish as your third sign, you’ll have lucky draws but make mistakes often.

My third sign was a watch, one of the few signs that make sense. Always on time, good at what you do. Engraved on the inside of the case—it was a pocket watch—were the words: “To L.M. May time be always on your side.” My initials, followed by the guild motto. On the back, the date: November 18, 1892. 100 years to the day before I was born.

From then on, everyone told me I was going to do great things.

***

“Sophie? What are you reading, honey?”
Sophie looked up and pulled the journal toward her nervously. “Just something for school.”
“Anything I might know?”
“I doubt it. It’s the class anthology. Short stories.”
“Anything good in it?”
“A few things.”
“You should let me read it sometime.”
“Mm-hmm. I’ll do that, Mom.” Tiffany Minden swept out of the room and left her daughter to her “schoolwork”.

***

Let me explain more thoroughly. I’m what we tend to call a Traveler, or sometimes a Member. To normal people, I’m just a fantasy—a time traveler.
You could probably fit everything we know about time travel in this notebook. For such a big thing, that’s not a lot of knowledge. We know how to do it, but not how exactly it works, if that makes any sense. It’s sort of like knowing how to turn on the tap but not knowing how or why the water comes out. We know that this thing of our, this Talent, is hereditary. It’s very rare to find a Traveler without a Traveler parent. We don’t know, though, why some people are travelers while others aren’t. There can be no apparent difference between two people—the can be identical twins, even—except that one can jump back and forth through time and the other can’t. It seems to everyone to be completely random.

Then there’s another random thing. Scattered all over the world are these stones. Sometimes they’re small sometimes they’re large, sometimes they’re smooth and round, and sometimes they’re jagged. They’re always shiny, though, iridescent like a beetle’s back. We call them time stones, sometimes just Stones. In our hands, they’re incredibly useful. They focus our powers and let us move smoothly from one time to another. In the hands f anyone else, they’re deadly.

I don’t mean that they’re poisonous or something. I don’t mean that they kill whoever has them. I mean that they can bring the whole freakin’ universe to an end.

It works like this.

In the hands of a non-Traveler, Stones jump time. Again, we don’t know how or why; we just know that they do. And when they jump, they take whoever’s got hold of them along for the ride.

Sometimes, this is just fine. Someone wakes up on Monday when the last thing they remember was Saturday. No big deal. They chalk it up to a bad night at the bar and forget about it. Other times, though, it’s bad. Very bad. Someone is thrown, say, ten years into the past, and for the next ten years, there are two of them. This is what the Guild generally terms a paradox, albeit a minor one. A greater paradox is the well-known Grandfather Paradox. Someone goes back in time, kills his grandfather (pre-grandmother), and is never born, ergo he can’t kill his grandfather and would have been born, thus killing his grandfather…

The universe can take some of these paradoxes, no problemo. It can take a lot, actually. But then you get one too many, and WHAM! There goes your happy little universe. It’s sort of a scary thought, really, that a kid picking up a pretty rock could destroy everything.

It happens about once a week.

What we—Members of the Guild, that is—do is we go to wherever and whenever a paradox is about to occur and we prevent it. It’s sort of a paradox in itself—we can stop it, because we know it’s going to happen, but because we stop it, so it doesn’t happen. Somehow this still works out, and always in our favor. Don’t ask me how. It’s just one of those things. But because of this, most Guild members figure that the universe’s paradox counter never resets back to zero.

But we take care of it, no matter what. That’s why the Traveler’s Guild was founded. It’s why anyone with the Talent begins training almost immediately and keeps working until they’re no longer physically or mentally capable. It’s why we do what we do, every day of every year that is, was, or might be.

And it’s why when something happens to the Travelers, all Hell can break loose.