Kendra ran up to her lab, and closed and locked the door. At last she felt the energy from the
three mouthfuls of food she’d swallowed.
She needed more, and trod over the textbooks and papers that littered
her floor to get to the food drawer in her lab bench. Her lab was a mess.
As she chewed on a snack bar, Kendra pulled on the old sweater
she kept on a hook behind the door.
Nights could get pretty cold in the drafty building, or maybe she just
drank so much caffeine that her arteries constricted. She shoved the last half of the snack bar in her mouth, big
mistake. Her jaw ached by the time
she’d reduced the chewy mass to a reasonable size. She wished that she could shower and change. Really she should keep a full change of
clothes in her lab. Kendra searched
through the piles of paper and books strewn everywhere for paper and a pen so
she could make a note to bring clothes.
Why was her lab such a mess? Dully, she remembered that she’d been kidnapped the moment
she returned from Elle’s room. Xenopoulos
and the goons must have searched her lab.
Yes, one end of the bench had been cleared of equipment and
her equation spread out neatly across it, as if someone had photographed it
all. She didn’t doubt that they
had. She gathered her equation
into a neat pile, and found her equipment on the far side of the bench.
As Kendra set about to put her lab back together as she
wondered why Xenopoulos had left the equipment, particularly Kendra’s computer,
intact. It only made sense if…Kendra
entered her password and watched her computer start up. Yes, there it was, the flash of a
different desktop just before her own appeared. The spy had cloned her system, and could watch every computation
Kendra made. Excellent. Kendra set to work with a
vengeance. She fed all the data
from the astronomy department’s star charts through the logistic difference
equation. With her computer fully
committed for at least twelve hours, she swept her lab for bugs. A few minutes later she added six of
them to the tin in her bottom drawer.
Finally she popped the memory card out of her well-hidden
counter-surveillance camera, picked up the printed version of her equation, and
left the physics building as the sun topped the horizon.
A shower had never felt so good. Kendra found herself fond of her toothbrush as well. In fact, all of her implements of
hygiene and even her shabby wardrobe seemed wonderful that day. It was with renewed zest and determination
that she walked to the diner. She
stopped first stopped at the bank where, having lost her wallet to the thugs at
American Missile, she withdrew some cash the old-fashioned way, then she gorged
herself, starting with a bagel and lox.
Full nearly to the point of nausea, Kendra followed a herd of
undergraduates to the main library.
She felt safe in the middle of a crowd in the light of day. The undergrads lingered in the sun,
laughing and talking on the library’s front steps, so Kendra lingered too. She even felt safe enough to revisit
her rescue from American Missile.
The vampires must want something from her. It had to have something to do with her
research, or they would never have rescued her. They hadn’t kept her, so maybe they wanted her to keep
working—or maybe they just didn’t want her to work with American Missile. Kendra sighed. She wished that all the new and nasty
players in her life would leave her alone.
The undergraduates
erupted in laughter. A few of the
boys wrestled. The onlookers
whistled and clapped, settling into a rhythmic chant. Kendra drew strength from their boisterousness, and again
examined the facts.
How had the vampires
found her? No one had
followed her into the past. No one
could, right? Kendra had an urge
to check on Elle, but that was probably the worst thing she could do. She didn’t want to lead any monsters to
her younger self. Elle had been
right to think that she was a key player, but in the current timeline it seemed
to Kendra that she herself was the target.
Both Xenopoulos and the vampires wanted her future findings, but why? What could they have in common? No, that was the wrong question. The vampire who had rescued her had dealt with the American
Missile paratroopers as if they were enemies, not competitors—or so she
assumed, not knowing anything about vampires. Why were the two groups fighting? How did they know what she’d do in the future…or did
they? Maybe they were just
guessing.
The questions were impossible to answer without more data. Kendra was a physicist. Her excitement was supposed to be found
in the life of the mind. She
didn’t want to play detective in some weird vampire espionage thriller.
The library steps were quiet. The undergrads had gone inside, and the sun had shifted,
leaving Kendra in shadow. She
shivered, though the afternoon was warm, and hurried inside.
In the library she found a cheery bunch of students around one
of two tables in a clearing between the stacks on the second floor. She sat at the other table, as close to
them as she could get, completely the opposite of her normal routine.
As she pulled her equation out of her bag, Kendra thought fondly
of her old lab, tiny and dingy though it had been. Obscurity was safe.
Maybe she should stop her research. She’d just write her dissertation and fade into the
industrial-scientific complex somewhere--or maybe not, maybe being barefoot and
pregnant in a log cabin with a dirt floor and tons of kids was the safe way to
go after all.
She sighed and slumped in her chair. The undergraduates’ cheer began to grate on her nerves. She glanced up and caught someone
peering at her through the books.
Kendra froze. It was
Matt. She groaned and rolled her
eyes. When she looked at the
shelves again, he was gone.
Damn it! Kendra felt a surge of anger. She was a PhD candidate. Research was her business. No one had any right to stop her. She stood up with such violence that the cheery undergrads
stopped yapping and looked over.
She ignored them, grabbed her bag, and then ran through the stacks,
checking each long aisle.
Matt was on the third floor, working studiously at a carrel
between two sets of windows. Kendra
stopped right behind him. She was still breathless from her run, and may no
attempt to hide it. He must have
heard her.
“Why are you spying on me?” she demanded.
He didn’t respond.
Kendra tapped him on the shoulder. He whirled around as if startled, but he overplayed the
gesture. She knew that he was
faking.
“Oh, hi!” he said with false cheer. “I’ve wondered how you are. You seemed a little drunk Friday night, and then you just
took off. Were you…are you okay?”
“Why are you following me?” Kendra persisted.
“Me? I’m not
following you. I’ve been here
studying for,” he checked his watch, “almost three hours.”
“You work for American Missile, don’t you?”
“W-w-what?” he stammered. “I’m a math geek.
Why would I work for American Missile?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Kendra demanded.
