Author: Elizabeth Hoyle

“You have to leave! Now!”
“Not the reaction I was hoping for,” I muttered under my breath, uncertain where to look after such a lackluster response to the revelation that I was a time traveler. “Why do I have to leave? I just got here.”
“Every second you’re here gives them more of what they want.”
“Which is what? Who is they?”
He hurried to the back of the room, pulled at a loose panel on the lower half of the wall.
“I saw that this might happen in one of the company’s files. Their emergency situation protocols were thorough. I didn’t think you’d show up so soon after I got it active. Luckily I prepared.”
I crossed the room as he pulled more panels from the wainscoting. “I was prepared to be the one answering questions not asking them.”
“I don’t have time to ask so go ahead with your answers. I am curious.”
“My name is Diana Silverman. I am a traveler from the Chronos Sola Company. One of ten who have been given access to the first completed time machine. This is my third successful trip—”
“What year?” He threw the question over his shoulder.
“Three C.S.—”
“They even renamed the dating system after the company? Hubris is too small a word for those fucks. You’ll have to squeeze.”
There was a knock at the door I’d landed in front of.
“Judging by the look on your face, that is not good,” I said.
“No, it isn’t. Come on.” He waved me closer to him and covered my head as I crouched into the hole he’d made in the wall. My heart skipped a beat when I saw it in the room. A sleeker, smaller, and better version of the time machine I had left in the lab at the Sola campus. I turned to him, my hair obscuring our faces from one another. Whoever was at the door knocked again.
“How do you have this? We’re in seven C.S., right? The machines aren’t at this level yet.”
“You don’t think they recently made these machines, do you?” He fixed me with a stare that was wary and pitying. “Chronos Sola has helped destroy the earth but they are the best gardeners, planting the seeds they needed to make their rise inevitable, their technology ubiquitous.”
My mind raced at his words. “You mean all of this has been planned?”
The knocking turned to a booming at the door. He shoved me further into the uncovered room. “Nothing is coincidence or luck when it comes to making those with resources even more wealthy.”
“Then this trip has been planned, too, just like my other ones. They’re looking for you and for their machine.”
He has one more board to put back into place. “Go home. Fight them however you can.”
“Rebellion is ubiquitous, too.”
He grinned then finished hiding me. The door in the next room gave after I jumped in the machine.