Thin Air

The kind of trouble that kills you.

“Cherise,” I said, testing out the name. She was either nodding or shuddering with the cold. I didn’t come closer, but I slowly crouched down, at least indicating a willingness to hang around. “What happened?”

Lag time. A long, unresponsive second of it.

“D-d-d-d-don’t know.” Her teeth were chattering like castanets, and her lips were an eerie shade of blue in her pale, pale face. Her eyes were huge, and they were the color of her lips. “Kevin…I remember Kevin was…he was trying to…”

“Was trying to what?”

“Jo, I’m so cold, please!” She didn’t seem to have heard me at all. Her voice was faint. Her shuddering was lessening, and I wasn’t so sure that was a good thing. “Kevin was trying to show me how to fight the fire.”

“What fire?”

Another lag, as if she had to wait for the words to circle the globe a couple of times before comprehending. “The one…” Cherise seemed confused by the question. “You know the one. The one they sent him to fight.”

“They, who?”

She just stopped talking. Blinked at me, like she had no idea why I was being so cruel to her. And honestly, I was starting to wonder about that myself. She looked so helpless, so fragile, that I couldn’t just leave her there. Not like some little match girl in the snow.

I looked around for Lewis, but he was a no-show, the fickle bastard. I could have used his ruthless practicality right now. Granted, he probably would have filled the poor kid full of bullet holes, but at least then she wouldn’t have been my problem.

No sign of him. No sign of David, either. Just me, Cherise, and the falling snow.

“Hold on,” I said. I might have sounded angry, but the truth was that I was scared. My heart was pounding hard, and I wished to hell that I knew the rules of this world, which didn’t seem to be the world I expected. Or knew. Or had known. Or maybe I was just going crazy; that would explain a lot.

I shook that idea off and focused back on Cherise. “Can you get up?” I asked her. She nodded, or at least that was what I took the convulsive jerk of her head to be, and tried. She managed to get to her hands and knees, but seemed stuck at that point, trembling like some poor wounded bird. I stood up, reached down for her, then hesitated. If this was a trap…

Then you’ll at least die with good intentions.

I sucked down a deep, cold breath, grabbed Cherise under her arm, and hauled her upright. It didn’t take much effort, as small as she was. The fuzzy pink sweater rode up, revealing a tattoo on the small of her back. Some kind of little gray alien dude waving hello. That implied a sense of humor. Maybe she wasn’t a bad kid, after all.

And maybe you’re crazy, part of my brain reminded me. I didn’t like that part. I wished to hell it would shut up.

I half dragged Cherise through the snow to the tent. She seemed barely capable of staying on her feet, even with me taking most of her weight, and I was glad I hadn’t hesitated about it too much longer. She was hardly breathing.

Getting her through the narrow tent opening was an engineering problem, but I managed, and soon I had her settled, wrapped in two thermal blankets, with heat packs warming her core temperature. In the light of the battery-powered lantern, Cherise looked ghostly, like the living dead. Which, I thought, might not be far from the case.

She didn’t say anything for a long time, and I didn’t, either. I couldn’t think what questions to ask, and obviously she wasn’t compos mentis enough to be coming up with conversation on her own. When she finally did speak, it wasn’t anything I expected her to say.

She asked, “Where’s Imara? I thought she’d be with you.”

Imara. I suddenly felt short of breath and I wished David were here. No, I didn’t wish that, because I didn’t want to think about what he’d be feeling at the sound of that name. This was all hard. It was hard not knowing, but it seemed to get worse the more I found out. Maybe ignorance really was bliss.

Cherise was shaking again, but I figured that was good; shaking meant her body was trying to warm itself, which meant she was coming out of shutdown mode. “Imara? Is she okay?”

I remembered the agony in David’s eyes, and again I just knew there was something there it would be better if I never had to face. “Where’s Kevin?” I asked instead, because I figured that if he’d recovered from whatever crazy spell he’d been under, he was in the same boat as Cherise…freezing to death out there.

Cherise seemed to try to remember. One second. Two. Two and a half, and then I saw comprehension flood her expression. Then get driven out by fear. “I…I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched with sudden panic. “Jo, we were in the forest. He was showing me…showing me how he did the fire stuff, and it was really cool, you know. He was proud of himself, and he was saying we could help people…”

I nodded. Not that I really understood. “And then what happened? Cherise, can you-”

“I don’t remember!” she said. “We were there, and everything was fine. We were doing fine, and…” Something darted through her expression like an electric shock, and her eyes widened. “There was someone else. She came out of the forest. She was…there was something…” Her voice failed, or at least her vocabulary. She shook her head, sniffled, and wiped at her nose. I dug in the backpack for a travel pack of tissues and handed one over. It took her the now-familiar couple of seconds to see what was being held in front of her face, and then she clumsily grabbed it and honked. She sniffled some more, and seemed better. “Something bad happened to us, didn’t it?”

I had no idea, but it seemed pretty likely she was right. Something very bad indeed had happened to her and Kevin. The problem was, I had no idea if it was still happening, and if it was, what that meant for my own safety.

I watched her like a hawk, but Cherise didn’t display any special powers, monomaniacal or otherwise. The lag time didn’t go away. She napped for a while, lulled by the warmth returning to her body-yeah, I knew how that felt-and when she woke up I broke off some energy bar and shared it with her, washed down with plenty of water. I noticed her fingernails. She’d been out there scraping her way through the forest, but once upon a time she’d had a nice manicure. Her skin had that well-lotioned look, too. No wrinkles. A smooth, flawless complexion. She’d had better hair days, but I had the feeling she’d clean up fine.

So what was going on with her? What did her missing time signify, and how did that relate to my missing time, if at all? And why was she Time-lag Girl?

As if she were reading my thoughts-scary idea-Cherise suddenly blurted, “Do you think we were taken?”

“Taken?” I paused in the act of loading the water bottle back in the pack. Cherise looked nearly human again. Amazing what a little color in the cheeks can do for a girl.

“You know. By them,” she said. She pointed upward with a trembling finger.

“They…?” And then I remembered the gray alien tattoo. “Oh. Them. Right.” Not that I wanted to sound judgmental, and hey, I’d hooked up with a former boyfriend who was apparently made out of liquid metal and could disappear at will, so who was I to scoff? “Uh, I don’t think so, honey.”

She was staring at me as if she were waiting for my reply, and then, two seconds later, she looked agitated. “But it makes sense! What if they…what if they did something to us!” Cherise suddenly threw off the thermal blankets in a crinkle of foil and began frantically groping at the back of her neck. She twisted the hair up and anxiously turned toward me. “Is there a scar? Did they put the chip in my neck?”

“There’s no chip.” I waited for her to grasp the fact that I was replying to her, and this time it seemed to take even longer. “Cherise, get a grip. There’s no scar, there’s no chip, and I don’t think you were abducted by little gray aliens. I don’t think you were probed, experimented on, or beamed up. I don’t think you went to the planet Bozbarr, either. Whatever happened, I think there’s a different explanation.” Not necessarily one any less crazy.

Cherise frowned, then looked disappointed. “But…it fits all the stories. We were away from people, and I don’t remember what happened. There’s missing time, and suddenly I’m back out here in the middle of nowhere…”

“This is something else.”

She was already talking over me by the time I got the words out. “Unless it’s something to do with the Wardens,” she said.

“You’re sure you don’t remember anything? Anything at all?” Cherise, after several seconds of silence, shook her head. I changed the subject. “Do you remember anything about what happened to Kevin? Where he could be?”