Yelloweye
3 Getting Grounded
The Family
THEY’D WORKED OUT A PATTERN. Everyone had work to do and no one could spend all her time reading the book left for Ramie by her younger siblings. Nor could they handle more at one time than the hour they spent in the evening holding each other as they read. Every word the kids had written cut into the hearts of their mothers, father, and siblings. Even Aubrey, the only one not related by blood, worried that the babies might be affected by hearing the story at such a young age. But more than that, she worried about her husband and wife.
Cole was late when he parked the ATV behind the ranch house. He’d driven to the upper pasture to check on the herd and his ranch hands. He was steaming when he sat at the table for supper with the family.
“They’re fencing in the whole area up by the hot spring!” he shouted after they’d taken a moment to consider the land before eating. “Sons of bitches. The government sold mineral rights in the National Forest and they’re exploring for oil.”
“They can’t fence off portions of the land that they already sold us grazing rights to,” Ashley declared. “I’m going to call Arlen Logan at the Forest Service right now.” She pushed back from the table. Cole put a hand on her arm.
“I called as soon as I got in range,” he said. “Nobody’s in the office. It’s Sunday. The damned Forest Service has taken to keeping bankers’ hours. Believe me, I filled up their mailbox with my complaint and we’ll start again in the morning.”
“After the way they stood up to the government six years ago, I had more faith in them than this,” Mary Beth said.
“They got cleaned out by the administration,” Ramie said. “At least they didn’t just sell off the forest up there. Is it the same group that’s up in the Yellowstone? They’ve closed the whole north half of the Park because of the protests.”
“It’s gonna get worse before it gets better,” Kyle opined. His words applied to many things.
After dinner, the family gathered again in the office to hear the next section of what the kids had written. Ramie carried the box and sat heavily on the couch. Each time she lifted it, it felt heavier. Kyle reached for her and she leaned against him.
“Laramie, honey, let me. This is too much for any one of us to take on alone,” he said. “We need to share this among us.” Tears sprang to Ramie’s eyes as she hugged her brother/husband. She let him take the box and fuss with opening it while Moms and Pa settled into their chair.
“I’m so proud of you, Jason,” Aubrey whispered. Kyle turned to look at her. “I know you couldn’t take this on alone, Kyle. If Jason wasn’t there to help it would be too much. I’m proud of you both. I am lucky to be loved by the two most wonderful men in the world and only have to deal with one cock.”
“I love you, Aubrey,” Jason said with Kyle’s voice. “I love this whole family.”
Ramie leaned across to Aubrey and was met by her lips. They let a long delicious kiss deepen. A tap on Ramie’s knee turned her attention to the toddler, Theresa. She crawled up into Ramie’s lap while Aubrey fished her breast out of her nursing bra to feed Katherine.
Kyle took a handful of papers from the box and cleared his throat.
Phile: Aliens
We were so focused on the wolves and accepting our new names in before-time as we slept in now-time that when Moms called us for breakfast and to get ready for school, we were like the walking dead. It was hard to reconcile the attack of the wolves and the time we’d spent tanning their hides and even eating their meat with the one night of sleep we’d struggled through as we were separated in our rooms. We were used to our other selves aging faster than we were but it was beginning to worry us. We wondered if in before-time we’d be old people by the time we were sixteen in now-time.
It wasn’t until our hands touched at the breakfast table that we snapped into this reality again. Or both realities. I’ve seen Mom Mar walk around the house cleaning and cooking while the whole time she was reading some paperback book. I think we were a little like that. Only our book was a whole other life. That was why it was so hard for us to read books in school. It was like trying to keep track of a third reality at the same time as we were living two others.
We might even have gotten crazier after that incident. We concocted schemes in before-time and executed them in now-time. Even when teachers made us sit on opposite sides of the room, we’d just talk in before-time. Miss Bradley, our science teacher, was mean. Not just to us, but everybody. Especially those who were a little strange. There were a few in our class. We started playing tricks on her, like moving her books or her glasses while she wasn’t looking. I know some of our classmates saw us do things. I’d ask a question about an experiment we were going to run and just as soon as she turned to look at me, Caitlin would turn to a different experiment in Miss B’s book so when she turned back she was reading from the wrong formula. Some of the other kids even joined in.
We weren’t invisible, but we were quiet and sneaky. A lot of the time, our classmates didn’t know we’d done something until they saw the results. The day a bird flew through the open window and pooped on her desk might have been a little much. She never let us open windows again. It was Mandy Stevens that cornered us. We’d only known Mandy since we started junior high in Laramie. She was one of the ‘weird ones’ like us, but she’d never really spoken to us before. All the weird kids kind of kept to themselves.
“You two are aliens,” she whispered after the final bell rang and we were on the way out to wait for the bus. “Can you teach me how to do that mental telepathy thing you do?”
“Huh?” when we answered with the same sound at the same time, Mandy started nodding her head.
“Like that. I won’t tell anyone. Do you have, like, a hive mind so you always know what everyone is thinking, or is it more like you talk to each other in your heads? Will you take me to your ship? I want to learn how to do it. Don’t worry, I’m good at keeping secrets. Oh, god! Can you read my mind?” She blushed crimson. Caitlin looked at me in our other life.
“I think she’s having dirty thoughts!” she said. We were usually careful about not speaking English in before-time. But Cait just blurted it out.
“I wonder which of us she’s fantasizing about,” I laughed. We didn’t get a chance to guess in now-time because Mandy never really shut up.
“I have to watch myself around you two. Just know that I mean you no harm. I friend.” She gestured to herself. All of a sudden, she was talking like she had to explain something to foreigners who didn’t speak English or something.
Mandy was a little strange, but she wasn’t a bad person. Other kids sometimes made fun of her because she was a little overweight and had a blotchy complexion. We never did. Just that little bit of interaction made us like her. Besides, we felt like we could use an ally, you know? We agreed in before-time. In now-time, we both put our hands out at the same time to touch her shoulder.
“Mandy friend,” we said in unison. She squealed and bounced a little.
“I knew it! I have to run right now because my mom’s waiting, but I’ll be ready any time.” She ran to a small car that pulled up and got in the back seat. Cait and I got on the bus and went home.
Caitlin: Friends
Strange as it sounds when Phile tells that story, Mandy has been our friend ever since that day. Until you opened the box, she was the only one who ever knew the truth about us. She helped us figure out some of the stuff that was going on. And, as wonderfully crazy as she was… is, she’s really smart and understands better than we could ever hope. She is a great adviser. And more.
Mandy became a kind of co-conspirator at school and we got away with things we never would have pulled without her. We just had to see Merv again after our encounter with the wolves. When Mandy saw the teacher was going down the attendance list and looking for us, she asked for a restroom pass and pulled the fire alarm. We got back to the school in time to make attendance at the rally point.
Merv had listened but had no time to respond to our experience before we had to run back to the school. He said he’d see us during the summer, but to keep learning.
“Suppose you had a bucket to fill with water from the garden hose,” Phile tried to explain to Mandy. “And there’s a good stream of water. But then someone comes along with a firehose to help you fill the bucket and suddenly it’s overflowing and you are trying to find another bucket but the water just keeps pouring in. We get now-time information just like everyone else. But we get before-time information two to five times as fast at the same time.”
“This would make a great science fiction story,” Mandy said as she listened. We’d started having lunch together every day and, little by little, the story came out. We weren’t sure how she’d take it and were always prepared to laugh at her and tell her we really put one over on her. That made us both uncomfortable because she really was becoming a friend. “Of course, it isn’t fiction, is it? What’s it like to have two lives going on at the same time? How do you keep them separate? With all the input you are receiving, how do you function at all?” She believed us and she was sympathetic. The only other person we had who we could talk to was Merv Longsteer and he just wasn’t available most of the time.
“It kind of drives us crazy,” Phile said. “Sometimes we forget which is now and which is before. We blurt out something in Cheyenne in now-time and people think we’re talking gibberish.”
“I’m learning Cheyenne language!” Mandy said. “I’m a quarter Cheyenne. Maybe you are my ancestors!”
“Oh, wow! How would you like to be my great-great-great-granddaughter?” I laughed. “That would really get confusing.”
“Before-time and now-time. It sort of makes sense,” Mandy said. “Do your before-time selves have a problem with that designation? I mean, to them, ‘now’ must be the future.”
“We were separated from the rest of the People after the massacre. When we left, we didn’t really have a native concept of future. The word that we’d translate to future is just the word for what is in front. Like if you walk in front of me, you are future. Even the word for tomorrow just means ‘in the morning’. But that only makes a difference if we are trying to explain to someone else—which we don’t. We only have one brain.”
“No, that’s not right,” I interrupted. “It’s part of the problem. We have two brains, but only one repository for all our memories. So, my before-time self is dreading the math assignment that’s due Monday as much as my now-time self is. And the me that is talking to you is just as concerned about having enough meat dried for winter to survive. And skins to keep us warm.”
“I’m hunting in before-time while we talk in now-time,” Phile said. “What I want is to be out hunting in now-time, too, so I can bring home twice as much meat. I just can’t get it to me in before-time.”
Just talking about it with Mandy helped us understand who we were. In both times. And she accepted everything we said as true, even to the extent of tossing out Cheyenne words that would help. Hétsetseha éÅ¡eÄ“va: today. Nésta-hétsetseha: before now.
We still got confused. We could be as noisy or as quiet as we wanted in before-time. Once I let out a whoop when Phile brought down a buffalo and realized that I’d whooped in the middle of English class. We were so thankful to get out of school for the summer.
We were confined closer to the house that summer because of the reports of wolves. We never went anywhere without our rifles. But being inside was like being trapped in a cave with an angry she-bear. We stole food from the kitchen at breakfast time and didn’t come in until dinner. We spent the time close to the house, but there were lots of animals we could talk to. Rabbits and squirrels were flighty and tended to have too much to do to stop and talk. That image of the White Rabbit being late is brilliant. Rabbits are always late for something and having to rush off. But they forget where they were going almost as fast as they run.
But there were some animals we just couldn’t get through to at all. It was funny how we could walk down a street near school and quiet a barking dog. But there was no communicating with a wolf. We came upon a rattlesnake sunning itself on a rock and both sat about ten feet away from it and tried to reach into its mind. We couldn’t tell the difference between the snake and the rock. There was just nothing there to contact. We finally agreed that we needed snakeskin sheaths for our knives. A rattlesnake doesn’t have a liver, I guess, and there was no spirit we could find there to thank. We cooked the meat and ate it anyway.
Phile: Horses
That was embarrassing. If it wasn’t for Mandy, though, Caitlin and I would have run away that summer. We’d started out twice and thought better of it. We’d finish our chores and go to the pond or the woodlot. We’d experiment talking with animals, but most of the animals around the ranch were dull. Squirrels, rabbits, gophers, pronghorns, and the occasional deer weren’t much company. The pronghorns and deer were the best of the lot. It wasn’t so much their intelligence that drew us, but their joy in freedom.
I think that’s what attracted us to birds, as well. I could attach to a hawk or an eagle and fly. Their thoughts were as alien as their view on the world. They did not spend all their time hunting. Much of the time was spent flying just to be in the air.
We were down in the river bottom when we heard about the new arrivals. No one bothered to tell us at the house. The horses passed the word along.
Talking to a horse is more akin to talking to a human than a rabbit. Horses have very long memories. In fact, I think a horse remembers everything from the time it is foaled until it draws its last breath. It only takes a flick of the ear to communicate between them. The entire time a horse is grazing, it is listening. It pays attention to everything. When that brown gelding I sometimes rode turned his eyes to me, I knew we needed to head to the barn.
Caitlin and I could see them—sense them—long before we got to the paddock. And there was such a joy that I’d never expected. Horses travel through time. The two paints in the pasture knew us. They were with us in other time as well as here. It was the first time that we did something completely simultaneously in both times. We looked into our horses’ eyes and they spoke to us in both times at the same time.
If this sounds anywhere near as strange as I think it does, it’s still nowhere near as strange as it was. It was like suddenly being grounded. We were calm and happy. Neither one of us could stop talking about it when we came in for dinner. I even had to tell Ramie I loved her. She did it without even knowing what it would mean to us. She brought our horses to us.
Caitlin: Bonding
The bond between our horses and us increased. Of course, Ramie didn’t know the two crippled horses lived an alternate life with us. No one knew, except Mandy. Ramie and Kyle had to go to the upper pasture for two weeks, but at least Pa let them go together. It was plain as the noses on our faces that they were in love with each other. But Kyle had a girlfriend he kept sneaking into the bunkhouse thinking no one knew.
I looked at them all together and could see a bond among them that had two very strong lines. One was between Kyle and Aubrey. The other was between Kyle and Ramie. What we could see, though, was that there was already a deep bond between Ramie and Aubrey and it was getting stronger every day. We’d overheard Moms and Pa talking, trying to figure out ‘what are we going to do with them?’ and knowing there was nothing they could do. It was funny that they never asked that question about Phile and me. It was like they were blind to the fact that Phile was my mate, even if we hadn’t had sex yet. We knew we would. We spent almost every night together in one or the other’s bed. We didn’t even think about wearing clothes. We never did when we slept together in before-time, so why should we in now-time.
Having Kyle and Ramie gone for two weeks was great. We were given the responsibility of caring for all the horses while they rode herd. Of course, we had to pretend to be put out about the extra work, but all we wanted to do was be with the horses. We even started picking up all the rocks in the little pasture near the barn where the two horses were the only ones allowed. The rocks hurt their tender feet and we were hoping the guy who drove them on concrete streets without shoes was having a particularly hard time in prison. We thought about sending rats to eat the soles of his feet, but we didn’t know exactly where he was. It was hot, sweaty work in the field and we welcomed showers when we came in at night.
Aside from the shower, coming into the house to sleep at night was a pain. We’d rather have stayed outside under the stars. The house was hot and muggy. We kept the windows open wide and sat on my bed to call Mandy. She answered right away and her image came up on Skype.
“Oh!” she said. “Hi. I didn’t… I mean…”
“Is something wrong, Mandy?” I asked.
“No. No, of course not.” She took a deep breath and stripped off her nightshirt. She had kind of floppy boobs and both Phile and me gasped when they came into view. Floppy or not, they were nice to look at.
“Mandy?” I said.
“I will always try to respect your customs, no matter what they are,” she said. “If this is the way you prefer to communicate, it will be fine.” I finally caught a glimpse of myself in the little window in the corner of the screen and then looked down. Neither Phile nor I had put a shirt on when we came to bed. Mandy decided that if I was topless, she should be, too!
It was a little embarrassing at first, but it was too damned hot to put clothes on to sleep. In other time, we only wore shirts when we were prowling near whites or moving with the village. We’d found a band to attach ourselves to and we were hunkered down in a valley to wait out the winter. The Wolf Twins were becoming well-known as hunters and providers for our people. Despite our ages, we often led the hunting parties.
I guess seeing Mandy naked was different, though, because Phile’s manhood was paying attention. I decided right then that we’d hold all our conversations like this.
“Thank you, Mandy. It is so much more comfortable like this than in the clothes of this age,” I said. Phile just nodded.
Before-time had slowed up from the rocketing pace of the first two and ten years, but it was still moving about twice as fast as now-time. In before-time, we’d aged two years since our twelfth birthday and were nearly the same age now. That got us a little scared. We didn’t want to be all grown up in before-time without being grown up in now-time, too. We wanted our now-time bodies to grow up faster, but they weren’t cooperating.
We’d had a topless chat with Mandy at least once a week all summer, but it was good to get face to face with her when school started again and we were in eighth grade.
“What are you writing?” I asked.
“Um… Everything, I guess,” Mandy said when she’d sat down at lunch with us and pulled out her notebook. “I’m… uh… Well, you’ve been an inspiration to me. I’ve started studying my Cheyenne heritage and how your experience fits into it. I think… You’ll think this is dumb, but I think I want to become a Medicine Woman. I went up to the reservation in Lame Deer for a week this summer and talked to the teachers there.”
“You didn’t tell them about us, did you?” Phile asked. We were both alarmed.
“No! Of course not! I talked to them about medicine and lore. I’ve got books like you wouldn’t believe! But I’d never betray you to anyone. Phile, you are important to me. I mean, really important, Caitlin. Like… really.”
During our summer, Mandy had become really important to us, as well. We could only see Merv Longsteer occasionally. We could see Mandy every day. Even with Merv, we’d never talked about who we were. We got lessons from him when we could, but they were about the craft of being Cheyenne, not about our other lives. Mandy knew almost everything. We’d let her know who we really are.
That fall, it was even harder to get time with Merv. We’d almost been caught there when Ramie showed up and Merv started showing her how to use a knife. Like to fight with. We had a funny feeling that more things as strange as our lives were happening in our family.
Mandy asked questions that got us thinking about what we are. We couldn’t begin to answer the questions she asked us. We’d never thought about which time was our ‘real’ time. Where did we belong? Since we were eight when we were born in before-time and could remember everything about it, we assumed that now-time was where we belonged. When a kid grows up, he normally only has a conscious memory of really big things until about the time he starts being independent. We had only fleeting memories of what our lives were like before Yelloweye gave us our other selves. Yet, we remembered every detail about growing up in before-time.
It shocked the hell out of us to imagine that our real lives—and perhaps the mission that Yelloweye had for us—was in before-time and we just needed the knowledge and experience of now-time in order to achieve the goal! Whatever it was. We did a lot of things differently in before-time than our contemporaries did, including our personal hygiene.
“So, perhaps your before-time selves are trying to slow you down in this life so they can remember more about this,” Mandy suggested. “If all eight of you agree, you can synchronize your aging. It would be easier on all of you.”
“All eight of us?” I asked.
“I don’t think your horses would have bothered to find you in now-time if they didn’t expect to be consulted about important things,” she said. My mouth dropped open. “So, there’s eight of you. Four in before-time and four in now-time.”
“If the horses are in both times at the same time, like us, we might be causing them to age faster in before-time, too!” Phile said. “I’m getting a headache.”
“Horses live a pretty long life. If they’re well cared-for, they could live to be thirty or more,” I said, beginning to figure out what Mandy was telling us.
“Yeah. So, if you are controlling the time and making it go faster in before-time, that means that you are moving them closer to death in before-time than they are moving here. If you are out of sync and they die at thirty in before-time, but they are only fifteen here, what’s going to happen to them?” Mandy asked. Her eyes got big. “You really need to talk to the horses.”
We needed to talk to Yelloweye, too, but we hadn’t seen him in either life for a long time. The only bird we ever saw around the ranch was an old one-eyed raven. I got shivers down my spine whenever I heard him caw.
I figured I’d just jump into his head and ask him if he’d seen Yelloweye.
He answered before I got that far. It startled me so much that I fell back right on my butt. Phile was on his way to the barn to get hay. He turned around and came rushing back to me. He was looking around and had his knife out like he thought someone was attacking me.
“You okay? What happened?” he whispered.
“I’m fine. Phile, we gotta sneak out tonight. We gotta meet Bells and Bows in the paddock. And the Wolf Twins need to take their horses to Medicine Rock. We’re all going to meet with Yelloweye.”
“Shit! How’d you know that?”
“That old raven told me,” I said. Phile turned and nodded to the half-blind bird.
“Messenger bird. Thank you for your help,” Phile said. The bird bobbed his head up and down like he understood English and then took off toward the mountain. “We better tell Bells and Bows.”
“We did,” I laughed. “This is so weird. The Wolf Twins are already with our horses and they already passed on the word.”
“Yeah,” Phile said. “Weird.”
Phile: Getting in Sync
We ran to the old cabin and got our bows from the chimney. There’s a rock under the kitchen porch at the ranch house we could lay them on so they didn’t rest in the moist soil. It was mid-October and getting dang cold out at night. I knew we’d have to wear our heavy coats, but there was no way I was going outside without any weapons. We couldn’t take our guns. If we were attacked by wolves—and we’d heard them howling closer and closer to the ranch—and if a bow wasn’t good enough to kill one, we’d die. But if we shot one, Pa would know, and I guessed I’d rather die than have Pa find out I was out with Caitlin in the middle of the night.
It was a tense night as we waited.
“You’re going to do it?” Mandy asked on Skype. We were getting used to seeing her big tits on our computer screen. I supposed she was getting used to seeing Cait’s. They were growing pretty fast now. Like my cock.
“We’re going out to the horses in about an hour,” I said. “The raven said méstahke would meet us.”
“You trust him?” Mandy asked. She started sorting through some notes in front of her. She kept jiggling her boobs from side to side. Even I was distracted. “You said the owl, Méstaa'e, was like the bogeyman. He’ll get you if you go outside at night.”
“Do you write down everything we say?” Cait asked.
“Mostly.”
“I’ve never been afraid of Yelloweye. If he tricks me into a place where I die, I go willingly,” I said. Caitlin nudged me in the side. Okay. I was peacocking for our friend a little!
“Ain’t gonna happen,” Caitlin laughed. “Don’t worry, little Mandy. We’ll come back for you.”
“You will?”
“Neither of us has seen enough of your tits yet,” she said. She kind of pushed hers out toward the camera a little. Mandy blushed. Maybe I did, too. My sister was displaying her proud breasts for our girlfriend.
“You just both be careful. Okay?”
“Yeah. See you in school Monday, Mandy,” I said. We closed the window.
“Phile and Mandy, sittin’ in a tree…” Caitlin sang at me.
“Hush,” I said. “I just like to compare what she’s got to what’s sitting beside me.” I reached over and tweaked her nipple a little. She gasped like a thousand volts of electricity shot through her. “And… um… you were just as turned on by her as I was.”
“You better behave yourself. We aren’t ready for that and you know it,” Cait whispered.
“Yeah. I know. But I’m getting interested,” I grinned.
We got ourselves dressed and sneaked downstairs and out the kitchen door.
Bells and Bows were waiting quietly for us. We grabbed a couple brushes and started on them while we waited for Yelloweye to show up. We’d figured out how to smash a sycamore branch down so it was all bristly on the end and were combing the knots out of our horses’ manes in before-time. It was cool. We were just tending our horses in both times, late at night, talking to them. I could feel the warmth of the fire in before-time, even though we had no fire in now-time.
I felt a stirring. Caitlin and I dropped our brushes and picked up our bows in both times. A man materialized from the shadows near the barn, only it wasn’t a man in before-time. Yelloweye soared from the sky and lit on the branch above us. Our heads combined the two. We could see the man in Yelloweye and the owl in our visitor.
“Merv?” Cait asked, shakily. Merv Longsteer approached us and stopped near Bells.
“I expected I would see you,” he said. “My granddaughter has been pushing me to help you. You quit coming to see me.”
“Your schedule got kind of crowded with Ramie showing up all the time,” I said.
“I see. I’ll find a place where we can have lunch together occasionally.”
“Who is your granddaughter?” Cait asked.
“Mmm. That would be Mandy Stevens. My daughter’s daughter. She says you are Cheyenne aliens. I hope she has been helpful.”
“Very. I like Mandy a lot,” I said. “We didn’t know she was related to you. But why are you here?”
“I’m not sure I am,” Merv said thoughtfully. “I remember going to sleep. But Yelloweye said he needed my voice.”
“You know Heove-'éxané?” I said.
“I serve whichever of the old ones have need for my voice,” Merv said. “This one has trouble getting things clear. He uses my mind and my voice to tell you many things.” I looked at Phile. Mandy was a little weird, but Merv wasn’t quite all there. Perhaps literally.
“We want to know how to synchronize our times so we don’t grow old in before-time while we stay young in now-time,” I said. Might as well cut right to the chase. I figured that even though none of us had talked about living in two times, Merv was there to interpret for Yelloweye and he knew.
“Yes,” Merv said. In before-time we could hear his words as though they came straight from Yelloweye. The horses shuffled around so they could face him, too. “You must forget time,” he said. It didn’t sound like Merv’s voice. “You must be always here now. You see two times, two bodies, where I see only one. You see two humans and two horses where I see only one. You see Redtail, Blackfeather, and Yelloweye, where I see only I. Accept that you are who you are. You are one.”
“I’m only thirteen. I don’t understand all this,” I moaned. Merv chuckled.
“It takes time,” he snorted. It was definitely Merv.
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s all Yelloweye is going to tell us? What about trying to get ourselves in sync so one doesn’t out-age the other? How do we coordinate things with the horses? What’s it mean to be one?”
“We’ll have to talk about this more. You can’t expect to understand everything at once. I’ll tell you what I think and you can decide what you think. I think Yelloweye has said that you are a visitor in time, not a captive. You need to accept that your before-time self is one with your now-time self. I don’t think you will do this easily. It is a task that Yelloweye has set for you,” Merv said. “I think that we should all go home and go to bed now.” Merv turned away from us and walked toward the barn. He just faded into the shadows.
Cait and I looked at the horses and they shook their heads like they didn’t understand either. We hugged them and petted them for a while, then we went back to the house. We hid our bows before we crept up the stairs and crawled into bed together.
The Family
The family was exhausted when Kyle said he couldn’t read any more.
“Pa!” Ramie practically shouted. “Them kids was… The kids were time traveling years before we were!” Sometimes when Ramie got excited she let herself forget good English. “They were struggling to coordinate their two halves just like the kids were. You stop and think about it, I’ll bet their lives overlapped with Laramie Wyoming Bell’s. Probably. That means with your life, too.”
“They sure overlapped with our lives,” Jason said. “We already know that I was the blond-haired soldier who gunned down their momma.”
“Jason, honey, don’t torment yourself over that anymore.” Ashley said. “It was 150 years ago. If any of you knew what you know now, none of that would have happened.”
“That’s just it,” Ramie said. “They do know. They know what happened and what is happening at the same time. They don’t have moments when their before-time selves and their now-time selves are cut off from each other and have to make decisions based on partial knowledge. Whatever the old owl has planned for them, whether in before-time or now-time, what we did to protect the land will pale by comparison.”
“What we’ve seen tonight in what they wrote is that the timeline doesn’t make a difference. They’d experienced what you did before you ever started time traveling, Kyle. It was already written. You couldn’t change history,” Cole said.
“The box was already open,” Ramie confirmed.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
