Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Read online

  Fugitives of Time

  James Wilson Penn

  Text Copyright © 2015 James Wilson Penn

  All Rights Reserved

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank several betas who worked on this project with me and were instrumental in getting it ready for publication. Thank you, Gretchen Hodges and Melissa Eddings, both of whom read drafts of the book and provided helpful and insightful comments that I have used to improve it. Thank you also to Andrew Malkasian, who provided extensive feedback on the first 9 chapters of the work. Thank you also to my mother, who made helpful and extensive comments on each chapter of the book. Of course, any errors that remain in the text are solely my own. Special thanks to Rachel Olson, whose diligent effort on making a pleasant cover for the book and the first book in the series is probably what inspired most readers to pick up the series in the first place.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 1

  Treason

  Spring rain pattered against the windows of the kitchen where four teens and one plump middle-aged woman sat drinking a variety of beverages. There were plates in front of each of them, with crumbs left over from the lunch of sandwiches they had recently finished.

  “See, I told you she’d believe us,” Rose said with a smirk, looking at Billy.

  “Sooner you than a government that was trying to convict you of treason, of course!” Aunt Jane said without hesitation. “I’ll admit I’d never thought much about whether Time Travel was possible before, but I always try to keep an open mind about things.”

  Tim snorted, but he realized quickly that Aunt Jane was one of a small number of friends the teens had in a world that was quite hostile at the moment. Julie and he were both wearing clothes she’d just lent them from the antique shop, for goodness’ sake. Tim was surprised they even qualified as antiques, since they looked like lightly used clothes from the seventies or something. But still, it was a nice thing to do and he wouldn’t want to alienate her.

  He gave a weak smile. “Well, you’re the first person here who believed time-travel was possible without actually doing it,” Tim pointed out. “So I think ‘open mind’ is a bit of an understatement.”

  “Hmmm, perhaps,” admitted Aunt Jane, pushing her glasses up her nose. “But I can’t think of any good synonyms for ‘open’. It wouldn’t do to call me vacant-minded, now would it? Maybe we should just say my mind is wide open.”

  “I guess,” Julie said, brushing her dark hair out of her eyes. “Still, even after I time-traveled the first time, I still thought I was crazy. It was only after Tim jumped back with me that I stopped thinking I might have to seek professional help.”

  “That did it for you, huh?” Billy asked, eyebrows raised. “I’ve time-jumped more than once, and I’m still not sure I’m sane. We’ve gone to the future to see the Emperors’ plan for 2347. We’ve gone back to 1916 to fix history to make sure that the plan didn’t succeed. And now, we’ve come to a new timeline the Emperors have cooked up in the meantime. Absolutely none of that has made me think that I’m not insane.”

  “Right,” Aunt Jane said. “So this timeline isn’t the right one either? The Emperors of Time made this one, too?”

  “Yeah,” Rose said. “We expected that they would manipulate events again, but we didn’t know the new timeline would be so stacked against us.”

  “I definitely wasn’t expecting to see a billboard declaring me a fugitive in my first half hour in a new timeline,” Tim confirmed.

  “I can imagine,” Aunt Jane said, nodding sympathetically. She paused for a moment, then continued. “I think I understand as much as I’m going to about the time-travel part, but how did you end up here, you know, once you got back to this time?”

  “Well, after the shock of seeing pictures of ourselves on a ‘wanted’ billboard started to wear off--” said Julie.

  “‘Started,’ because I don’t think it’s actually going to completely wear off ever,” Billy interrupted.

  “Anyway, after we drove around for a bit, I finally convinced them to come here, ‘cause I knew we could count on my Aunt Jane,” Rose said with a smile.

  “Yeah, even though we hadn’t even met you in this timeline, and you could have been a completely different person, if you existed at all,” Tim said, still convinced they were pretty lucky things had worked out as well as they did.

  “Well, whatever, it was basically our only option, and we were ready with our Domini in case it went sour,” said Billy.

  “I still feel like maybe I should have called your mother and at least told her you were all right,” said Aunt Jane.

  “Right… except, like we told you before, then we would be in police custody, and therefore not okay,” Rose said.

  “You really think she would turn you in?” asked Aunt Jane.

  “We just can’t risk it,” Julie explained.

  The five around the table were startled out of their conversation as the door opened. Tim jumped out of his chair, thinking that it was a police-officer or another minion of the Emperors of Time. Luckily, it turned out to be Rose’s Uncle Patrick, wearing a dark-blue poncho with a hood pulled up over his graying hair.

  Uncle Patrick sighed as he closed the door behind him and shoved the hood of the poncho back.

  “Should I put another kettle on for tea, dear?” Aunt Jane asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” Uncle Patrick said. “Sorry I’m late. It took a while for the cab driver to come get me downtown. I understand he had to come from Harrisburg, but I called him in plenty of time. Lucky the poncho kept me dry. Well, mostly dry, but in running out of the house, I forgot to change into my boots. There’s puddles like lakes down on Main Street, so my socks are soaked through from my ankles to my toes.”

  “Well, you certainly couldn’t have waited in the car,” Aunt Jane said.

  “Yes, that would’ve rather defeated the purpose.” confirmed Uncle Patrick, stripping off his poncho and hanging it on the coat rack next to the door.

  The purpose, Tim knew, was to get rid of the car in a way that wouldn’t tie Uncle Patrick back to it. The police were already looking for the teens for being fugitives, and at this point they would know they’d stolen Billy’s mother’s car. Now that they were hiding in Uncle Patrick’s and Aunt Jane’s house, they didn’t want to have the thing sitting out by the curb.

  They figured if Patrick was pulled over on the way to dropping the car off, he could claim he was returning it to Billy’s mother. The cops would be looking for a bunch of teenage fugitive joyriders, unless they had been directly recruited by the Emperors of Time, in which case they would be looking for a bunch of time-jumping teenagers. Either way, a middle aged man would not fit the description.

  Soon, Jane came back in with a kettle full of boiling water.

  “Does anyone else want a refill?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Rose declared, as she reached for a second packet of hot chocolate from the table.

  Julie shook her head at Rose’s excitement. “I’ll take some hot water as well.”

/>   “Would you like another teabag?” asked Aunt Jane.

  “No thanks, plenty of flavor left in this one,” Julie said.

  “For you, Tim?” asked Aunt Jane. “More coffee?”

  “I’m taking it slow,” Tim said. Tim had never had more than one coffee in a day, and rarely drank it at all, but this was the second time this week he’d had the beverage. Well, it was the second time in the week for him. Even though the last cup had been in 1916.

  “I can’t believe you guys are drinking hot drinks in the spring,” Billy commented as he finished off a bottle of spring water.

  “There’s more water in the fridge, honey,” offered Aunt Jane. Billy thanked her and went over to the refrigerator to get some.

  After all the drinks were in order once again, the six of them sat around the table. Rose turned to her uncle and was about to launch into explaining the story of their expedition through time when Aunt Jane interrupted her.

  “I can explain it to him later,” she suggested. “But first, I want to know what you think you’ll need from us. We’ll do whatever you need, of course, but it’s not every day you find out your only niece is on the run from the law, and it’s also not really the sort of thing you prepare for. Have you put any thought into what your plan is?”

  “Well, we’re thinking on our feet, of course,” Rose answered, glancing at the others. “But, basically, I guess we thought you could let us stay here until we figured out our next step.”

  Aunt Jane nodded, and was probably about to say of course they could stay, when Julie spoke up first. “I think we need to head on over to the oak tree. That’s how Hopkins said he would get in contact with us, or we could get in contact with him.”

  Tim nodded. “And it’d be nice to know what else has changed about history, aside from the fact that we’ve apparently done something, or been accused of doing something, that has landed us in jail. Do you guys happen to have any history books around?”

  Patrick chuckled, a smile showing through his blonde beard and mustache. “In our antique shop next door, we have history books from just about every decade before the 1990s. As long as it doesn’t have to be current, we’ve got you covered.”

  “That should be fine,” Tim said quickly, as Rose nodded agreement.

  As Tim nursed his coffee, the others drank their second round of beverages.

  “I still can’t believe that you guys are drinking tea and cocoa,” Billy reiterated. “It’s April!”

  Rose shrugged. “It was November a few hours ago,” she said. “Besides, it’s raining. Hot beverages are always good when it’s raining.”

  “And tea is just always good,” Julie said. “The temperature outside doesn’t matter.”

  So as they drank, the four teens chatted, with Jane and Patrick periodically chiming in. Soon, Patrick went back to the shop next door, which he had temporarily closed while he got rid of the car. Meanwhile Jane began clearing the table from lunch and washing off the dishes. When Billy offered to help, she politely refused, saying she she’d never really minded doing dishes.

  It was weird maintaining small talk while they got ready to see what cataclysmic changes in history might have already taken place in this timeline. Still, they had been through a lot in the past week as it was, and the four teens seemed to have an unspoken rule about taking breaks from their new and borderline insane reality when they needed to.

  Finally, once Rose took her final sip of cocoa, she spoke up as if one cue. “Ready to figure out what those rascals have done to our timeline, then?”

  “Rascals?” Billy asked, eyebrows raised.

  “What, you don’t think they qualify as rascals?” Rose asked.

  “I dunno, sounds like it could be the mascot for a real lousy minor league baseball team or something,” Billy said.

  “Or maybe a bunch of four and five year olds who are up to no good,” Julie suggested.

  “But not a group of evil adults who use time travel to take over the world,” Tim said.

  “Especially because they don’t play baseball,” added Billy.

  “Okay, but just to clarify, we should still find out what they did, right? Like, you guys have no objections aside from the smart-alec ones?” Rose asked.

  “Right,” Billy confirmed, and soon they were being led by Aunt Jane over to the antique shop.

  “It’s convenient that you guys live right next door,” Tim pointed out, as the group of five made their way briefly outside. He meant that it was convenient for Jane and Patrick on a day to day basis, although it certainly carried an extra convenience now, when the four teens were fugitives. They only had to be outside for a moment as they slid from one door to the next in a downtown duplex.

  “Quite,” agreed Jane. She paused for a moment, then looked to Rose. “Do we own the antique shop where you guys came from too? In the other… ‘timeline’?”

  Rose nodded, her curly blonde hair bouncing up and down. “Yep”

  “You owned an antique shop in my timeline, too,” Julie said.. She paused, then realized that she was getting an odd look from the middle-aged woman. “Sorry, I’m from a different timeline than the others, because Hopkins recruited me first. I came back to an altered timeline and then found the others.”

  Aunt Jane shook her head with a slightly dazed expression. “It’s not easy to keep track of it all,” she said, after a moment.

  “Now you know how I feel,” Billy said, with a sympathetic, if slightly over dramatic, wince.

  They had entered the door of the antique store, which looked both similar to and different from the store in the same location that they had entered only about a week before. The walls were a different color, and Tim was pretty sure that the clothing racks were in different places, but they still had a lot of the same kind of stuff. Books, clothes, dolls, china, and furniture mingled chaotically in rooms built on the same model as those next door. They made their way through the kitchen, where china and kitchen furniture were on display, to a staircase.

  “We have most of our books upstairs in storage and bring them down as the ones down here get bought. But most of our better history books are up there, too. Patrick won’t bring them down because he’d rather keep them than sell them. Although I probably don’t really have to tell you that, Rose. I can’t imagine he’s much different where you come from.”

  As they walked up the stairs, Rose spoke up. “Speaking of different timelines… What did we do here, or what are we supposed to have done, to get put in prison?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Jane with a bit of a laugh. “I guess I’d forgotten that you wouldn’t have any way of knowing that. Well, you were accused of treason.”

  “Treason?” asked Rose, stopping in her tracks so suddenly that Billy bumped into her. Tim was surprised, too. Treason wasn’t a common accusation in the timeline they came from. It was true that not everyone was on board with all that the government did, and some even did things that interfered with government goals, like distributing secret government knowledge over the internet.

  Tim knew this because he had read articles such dissidents had published. But the government seemed to know better than to accuse these people of treason, on the rare occasions when they could catch them. This was probably because treason traditionally carried the death penalty, and the U.S. government, at least in Tim’s timeline, was not in the business of making martyrs.

  “Oh yes,” Jane said. “I doubt you’ll be the last people accused of treason this month, even. The government is rather fond of using it as a technique to weed out potential rebels.”

  “What? That’s absurd! How do they get a conviction? I thought they needed two witnesses to convict someone of treason!” Billy said, running a hand through his short blonde hair.

  “No, not here,” Jane said. She considered. “Not in this timeline, I mean.”

  “Well, don’t they have The Constitution in this timeline?” BIlly asked.

  “Sure, but we also have the 25th Amendment. It allow
s for conviction in a treason trial by agreement of a special committee of seven congressionally appointed federal jurists. Sorry if it sounds like I’m quoting from the constitution. They made us memorize all the 20th century amendments when we were in school.”

  Tim knew this wasn’t what the 25th Amendment said in his timeline, but was also painfully aware that the current constitution was what mattered now. Billy shook his head and muttered something about how absurd their new government seemed to be.

  They reached an upstairs room. Jane opened the door to reveal that it was full of books of different varieties and also a bunch of newspapers, including both some old yellowed ones and some that seemed fairly current.

  As they waded into the room past the stacks of papers and volumes of history textbooks, Aunt Jane remembered another fact from her schoolgirl days. “Of course, now that you’re fugitives, they don’t have to wait for a conviction. Since you were accused of a serious crime and fled from justice rather than defending your own innocence, you’re now considered guilty until proven innocent.” She waved away another objection from Billy. “It’s all there in the 25th amendment. If they catch you now, they won’t bother arresting you again, they’ll just shoot you on sight.”

  Chapter 2

  Books

  As distressing as it was to hear that there were orders for them to be shot on sight, the four teens had plenty of other concerns that afternoon. Jane left them in the room and went off, probably to discuss the tale that Rose had just told her with her husband.

  There were five bookshelves in the room. Two entire three foot long shelves were stuffed with haphazardly organized books on American and world history. It was Rose who found these particular shelves in the first place, one on top of the other on a bookcase at the far end of the room. Both she and Tim dove into these books, eager to see how history had turned out differently in this new timeline and to try and figure out what the Emperors of Time had manipulated in history to make the change happen.

  Meanwhile, Julie and Billy browsed around the room. Tim assumed that this was mostly because they had less interest in history than he and Rose did, but that didn’t stop Julie from making a quick and interesting discovery as she began shuffling through the newspapers laying on a desk in the corner of the room.