13

“Okay, you expect to live until you’re eighty--that’s fair,” Kendra encouraged.  “Personally, I hope we make it to one hundred, brain intact, but we can work with eighty.  You will graduate high school in the middle of next year, when you’re fourteen-years-old.  Roughly what percentage of our life remains?”

“I do?”  LB squinted at her in disbelief.

Kendra looked at her young, over-confident, incredibly vulnerable self.  “Yeah, you do.”  She smiled a little.  “I’m nineteen.  We get through college in two-and-a-half years, then start the PhD program in physics.  I’ll finish four months from now, provided I finish my dissertation.”

“Is that the time travel stuff?”

“No,” Kendra said with relish.  “Time travel is what will make us rich.”

“All right!”  LB sat on the edge of her seat. “I’ll have 82.5% of my life…our life…left when I graduate high school, and I’ll be rich.”

“Right.  Eventually.  I hope.  If your grades improve enough to get into Stamford.”  Kendra then proceeded to decimate every argument that LB could make for the importance in her young life of her current bunch of friends--or of any friends, for that matter.

“Come on,” objected LB.  “You must have friends.  You’re me, and I’d be lonely without them.”

“You recover.”

“But who do you talk about LA Nights with?  I know I’d never stop watching that.”

Kendra stared at the girl in disbelief.  “You don’t have time to watch TV.  You should have stopped that last week.” 

“But--”

“Do you or do you not want to figure out time travel?”

“So we can be rich?”

“Yeah, but more for the beauty of the science involved.”  Kendra felt her eyes sting.  Did she really still believe in the passion and purity of science?  An industrial spy was after her!  She shook her head and willed her tears away before they formed enough to fall. 

Maybe she did need a friend, but if her younger self didn’t understand the passion for knowledge that drew her on, who else would?  Who could she trust?  Kendra thought of the new menace she’d felt from the night shadows on campus and shivered.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, and jumped.

“What’s wrong?”  Elle pushed Kendra’s shoulder back gently, trying to get her new mentor to look up at her.  “You are lonely, aren’t you?”

Kendra’s eyes stung again.  Years later, when she looked back on all that she had done, she would always blame all that came next on her own emotional weakness.  In the half-light that followed dawn, whether mentally dulled by sleep deprivation, or simply too alone, she blurted, “No, I’m not lonely.  I’m hunted.”  The silence that followed was broken in her imagination by the hollow gong of destiny.  Someone groaned.  Kendra realized that the sound came from her.

“What?”  Elle scurried into bed, drew her knees to her chest, and pulled the covers as close to her chin as she could get them. 

Great, thought Kendra.  She’d scared the kid.  To have such a parental thought made her laugh, but it may have been despair, so much depended on her younger self.

LB looked at her like she was crazy.  “Why are you laughing?  Is someone chasing you or not?”  The false bravado faded the instant after it had been expressed.  “Will the hunter follow you here?”

Kendra’s smile froze.  “No one else knows how to travel in time, not yet anyway.”

“Then how can we be rich?”

“What do you mean?” Kendra asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Well, if you’re hunted in your time, then it must be some kind of crucial point, like you’re about to sell the secret of time travel or something.  Time travelers who want to beat you to it should be stepping out of the woodwork about now.”  Elle glanced nervously around her dimly lit room.

Kendra hung her head, ashamed that she’d brought the potential for danger to Elle.  They were in a crucial time.  If LB didn’t pull it together and start to innovate math and physics, then her own ability to travel in time was in jeopardy.  She felt her stomach lurch, and wondered if something had just changed in her own timeline.

“Okay,” Kendra said, “I suppose you’ll be safer if you know who to watch out for.”  She proceeded to tell Elle everything that had happened since Xenopoulos appeared in her life.  LB listened without interruption.  Kendra regretted that lack of interruption by the time she’d finished the story.  If her younger self had broken in, then Kendra would have had time for the second thoughts that plagued her then.

“I have to go.  I should never have come.”  She looked at the frightened girl.  “You can do this.  Work hard.  Trust your questions.  If your teachers don’t understand them, find better teachers, but don’t talk to strangers--at least not to Xenopoulos or Matt.”

LB nodded, uncertain.  Each regarded the other with silent intensity for a moment, and then LB’s face lit up.

“I know who could help us!”

“Who?”

“A vampire!”

Kendra exhaled impatiently, and rubbed her tired burning eyes.  “You’ve got to stop with fiction and fantasy.  You don’t have time.”

“I-I-don’t think it’s fantasy,” stammered the girl as she scrambled out of bed.  “Look at this.”  She pulled a notebook from her bookshelf and shoved it at Kendra.

Kendra opened to the first page.  It was filled with an equation, a quirky use of the logistic difference equation, but the population represented looked like Matt’s equation.  “What is this?  Nothing in nature behaves like this.”

“I know.  They’re nearly immortal, but through the ages the pograms against them have checked their population, until now.”

“It’s an elegant curve, but vampires don’t exist.”  Kendra closed the notebook, and held it out to Elle.

“Look at the second page, and the rest of them.”

“Listen, the math and imagination you show in here,” Kendra gestured with notebook she still held outstretched toward Elle, “is great, but--”

The intensity of the girl’s stare stopped her.  Kendra sighed and looked at the second page of the notebook, then the third and the fourth.  When she’d finished all twenty-one pages, she stared at Elle.  “You…you proved the existence of vampires,” she stammered, “or some sort of non-indigenous being that preys on humans.”

“Thank you very much.”  Elle gestured with both hands, as if she spoke to an adoring audience.  She was too pleased to remember to keep her voice down.

“Kendra?” their mother called through the door, and then knocked.  “Are you all right in there?”

The door began to open.  Panicked, Elle met Kendra’s eyes.

Kendra tossed the girl her notebook, and pressed the fob in her pocket as she spun on the floor of LB’s room.  She thought she heard, “ But I didn’t tell you where to find them…” as the girl’s bedroom vanished in swirl of blurred motion.