10

Kendra rode the bus through its hour-long circuit.  She needed time to think.

Halfway through the ride she concluded that thought without sufficient data was useless.  Try as she might, she couldn’t deduce any new facts from the little she knew about Matt or Xenopoulos. 

Matt.  She thought again of the two dimly lit upturned faces she’d seen from Matt’s window before she fled the scene.  The two must be in cahoots—but how could good old Shaggy work with a dirty rotten spy, or whatever Xenopoulos was…physicist, vampire?  Kendra was sure that Matt would easily explain it all, and it could be worth letting him try.  She might pick a few clues out of his pack of lies…but then she remembered the sweep of his pec muscles.  Matt had to be a lot stronger than she was.   If she saw him again, he might capture her for Xenopoulos.

There on the number eleven bus, Kendra felt a wave a motion sickness that had nothing to do with the bus.  What had she gotten herself into?  As she cast about for someone who might help her, she flashed on Phil Rosenberg’s face.  She imagined him squaring off with Xenopoulos, and snorted.

“We’ll see whose development is arrested then, pal,” she muttered, remembering how willingly Professor Healy had become the elegant spy’s lapdog.

Amusing as it was, the image didn’t help Kendra escape the one—no, two, she thought firmly.  Matt was definitely an enemy—spies.  For a moment, she wondered how it was that they were both so attractive, but then she yanked her mind back to business.  She could hop into the past to avoid Matt at the bar.  Though it seemed straight forward, Kendra knew it might not work.  There were too many variables that she knew nothing about, like had Matt tailed her before she went into Carlisle’s?  Probably.  For how long?  Besides, was it really ethical for her current or future self to hop back to “help” her younger self?  For her own psychological well being didn’t she need to make mistakes and suffer their consequences, like the rest of humanity?

She wanted to ask Phil, but he’d probably have her committed.  The moments of cognitive disequilibrium piled up until Kendra’s psyche folded.  She was succeeding in her research, and that’s what mattered.  If she left Xenopoulos and Matt alone, they’d leave her alone.  She felt better…until the bus reached the university, the stop closest to her apartment, and she left its warm well-lit interior.

It was one in the morning.  The campus was empty.  Though she regularly walked from her lab to her apartment after midnight, never before had she felt menaced, as if someone were right behind her. Kendra power walked across the campus.  When she reached the north end, the feeling of being followed sharpened, forcing Kendra to give up whatever shreds of decorum had survived her strange night.  She ran the five city blocks to her apartment.  She glanced back several times as she fled, but saw no one.

She searched her place twice with all the lights on before she changed into her cozy, ripped-up sweats.  She looked around her spartan apartment for something to do until she got sleepy.  Reruns of Scooby Doo were out--she had to keep Shaggy/Matt out of her head if she were going to sleep.  Kendra grabbed one of the five well-thumbed Star Trek novels she’d brought with her from Kansas, and stretched out on the only piece of furniture in her living room, a second-hand recliner.

Kendra hadn’t read that novel (or any novel) for fun since her freshman year in college.  The night’s events made it difficult to concentrate, but after she had reread the first paragraph four times, the words burst through the barrier of her anxiety, and she happily surrendered herself to the story.  She’d forgotten lots of it, and welcomed the opportunity to reacquaint herself with old friends.  She fell asleep right after the Enterprise crew had its first showdown with a renegade Romulan ship.