“No, it’s room temperature.” He takes a huge swig, something he wouldn’t be able to do if it were as hot as I think it is. “It’ll probably take a few more minutes before your body adjusts. There seem to be a few...side effects.”
“Side effects to what?”
“The time jump.”
“That makes no sense.”
I try to push myself vertical, but a head rush drops me into his arms. He settles me back into the seat.
“Don’t try to stand yet.”
“Merde.” I pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “What happened?”
“Don’t know. I woke up fifteen minutes before you came ‘round. You scared the hell out of me,” he says, exhaling a loud breath. “I’m pretty sure we were knocked out when we hit the portal.”
“Felt like I was floating.”
He bends down on one knee, scrutinizing my face like a doctor examining a patient. He grabs a pen light and shines it into my eyes.
I cringe, squinting against the brightness. “Hey!”
“Everything go black?” he asks. “No sounds or smells?”
I nod. “There was a lot of buzzing, too. It was like—”
“Like your insides vibrated so hard they might bust through your skin?”
“Exactly.”
He drops the pen light on the command console. “If your recovery is like mine, you’ll be back to almost normal in a few minutes.”
“How are you feeling?” I ask, leaning forward to search his face for lingering physical symptoms. His skin is a little flushed, but no dilated pupils.
“The headache is almost gone,” he says, standing. “It took a few minutes to stay vertical without the head rush. I need to bring the transporter system back online. You sit and rest for a bit.” He gives a command to the computer. “Betty, get our chameleon cloaking up and running.”
“Chameleon cloaking up and running, Gorgeous,” she replies.
Nico turns to leave the cockpit, and I grab his hand. This time, he doesn’t pull away. Maybe because he was scared to death I was dead. I want to tell him, again, how I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, but the look in his eyes talks me out of it: He’s still pissed as hell.
I drop his hand and the idea of defending myself. “Any idea where we are?”
“Hopefully, we’re exactly where your coordinates said we’d be: December 1755. One of the Acadian settlements just before...”
I pick up where he paused. “Just before The Expulsion. If we can find my parents—”
“We’ve impacting the timeline enough, don’t you think? The only reason we’re here is because it’s marginally better than doing prison time.”
“I’d say it’s better than the options Carter gave us.” Feeling brave enough, I push myself out of the co-pilot’s seat and—wrestling with the Tudor gown I’m still wearing—elbow past Nico to head for the galley. Maybe caffeine will help the time jump jet lag lift quicker. “At least we have a little bit of time to figure out what to do next.”
Nico follows me to the replicator. “I wouldn’t count on having time to do anything. The physical effects of this trip through the portal are singular. Unprecedented. To my knowledge, nothing like this has never happened before because, if it had, we’d have heard about it during training briefs. Something has changed.” He watches me make two cups of Nico’s chicory coffee blend. “Not to mention, if Carter follows us into the portal, he can pick up our energy signature through T-Jump Ops and get our location. For all we know, they could already be here.”
I hand a mug to him. He barely glances at it before setting it down with a thunk on the counter. I drink the liquid down, but can tell it will take at least a dozen cupfuls to clear the haze clouding my brain.
“That fog out there?” He points out the window. “I haven’t had time to run tests, yet. If we’re not where we’re supposed to be, that stuff could be anything. Who knows if we’re even still on Earth and whether it’s breathable out there.”
“Or it could be just fog off the Bay of Fundy. That stuff rolls in off of the ocean all the time.”
He doesn’t seem to appreciate the tone in my voice. He puts his fists on his hips, then gives me a smirk and a raised eyebrow. I roll my eyes. “Betty, can we breathe the air outside? Also...confirm current coordinates.”
“External atmospheric composition supports human life,” Betty says. “Current coordinates: Earth, 5.2733 degrees North, 66.0633 West. What is now Saint John, New Barcelona. Would you like to hear how the area was colonized by the Spanish in the late Sixteenth century or the weather report?”
“The Spanish?” My stomach churns and it’s not because of time travel jet lag. “So, it’s not a French-settled colony, then?”
“There are humans of French descent settled in the area, but they are the minority,” Betty says.
I haven’t worked missions in Spanish-colonized eras, but I know Observers who have. When I was a pint-sized recruit—Fagin had plucked me from Eighteenth Century New Orleans only weeks before—a first year Observer made it thirty-six hours into a month-long Spanish Inquisition mission before returning in a catatonic state. The experience so traumatized him, the agency created the Hot Zone policy: No First Years assigned to missions set in historically merciless, overly volatile, and brutal times.
Poor guy never recovered.
Trauma would be easier to manage if memory wipes were an exact science; if they could be targeted and selective enough to erase only the bad and leave the good. It doesn’t work that way. Wiping a mind is an all-or-nothing proposition. All Observers carry the burden of memory. Some better at it than others, and if they’re not, they at least hide the pain behind a believable mask.
All time travelers undergo regular psychological testing, especially after psychologically scarring work events, but there are ways to get around those tests. Self-medication is the most popular option Observers employ, to some degree or another, to manage the
