UNSPOKEN: Undone Realms Book 3

Ch. 26: Timing is Everything

After stepping through the Fold in Avie's hotel room, Nolan locates the pathway to his home realm. Despite what he'd just told Avie about the pitfalls of traveling back in time, he sets his entry point for a day in the past, just after the Ban had started.

He does not divide himself: there are enough Nolans.

What he's doing is in the best interest of the Vitalists, though he's pretty sure his mother would disagree if she knew. His official mission does not include inverse time travel. After sending Avie to the pocket realm, he's supposed to be overseeing that realm's evacuation. Vira doesn't trust any other agent to seal up Clara's realm without causing some sort of catastrophe. As tempting as it is to revel in his mother's confidence in him, if he's going to avoid destroying a world or two, he needs to understand everything he can about the situation. That means observing how the pocket realm has changed throughout the Ban.

If the Vitalists want him to succeed, they'll have to deal with his methods (not that he's planning on telling them what those methods are).

The night he'd left, determined to find his mother in Canada, the shock of dividing for the first time had somehow stripped him of his ability to see into the pocket realm. He's learned so much since then, though-all he can do is hope that that ability will come back to him.

Nolan arrives on the far edge of the forest grove. It's summer; the air is heavy with the scent of a million blackberries. He circles around the trees and walks down a street lined with the yellowing lawns of modest homes before turning onto the main drag. Sure enough, when he is still blocks away from the hotel, other realm matter presents itself to him as a low, halting thrum. His heart falls; the realm's energy frequency is muddled. This is Nolan's first concrete proof that what the Vitalists claim about the pocket realm is true-it is slowly failing and has been most likely since the day it first came into existence.

Nolan approaches the hotel, coming as close as the convenience store across the street. He stands on the store's front stoop, pushing himself back against the wall between a soda machine and an ice cooler. He wants so much to jump into Clara's realm but even if he is able to access it, it would be a bad idea. How can he take the risk of interacting with Clara years before he's actually supposed to meet her?

He's only been standing there a few minutes when a young girl, black hair flying wildly behind her, runs across the hotel parking lot. Nolan's body goes ridged; a car is backing up and the driver doesn't seem to see her. Nolan is about to yell, about to break his decree not to approach the hotel, when the car runs over-no through-the girl, then switches gear and drives away. The little girl, impervious, continues to run until she reaches the gate to the pool yard. A few seconds later, she's cannon-balled herself into the pool. He waits, but she doesn't come up for air.

Clara.

His muscles relax. For the first time in a long while, he feels as though he's home.

#

Nolan slips forward in time by opening the Fold, entering it, resetting the coordinates, and then returning to his home world. This is another trick only he seems able to do. Most journeyers must cross into another realm in order to return to the world they came from at a time in the future. Not so for Nolan. He is full of surprises. Nolan returns to the hotel once a year; more and more Clara's pocket realm beats at a sicker rhythm, while the overlap between it and his home realm grows. Occasionally, he has trouble distinguishing between the two.

The strangest sensation comes, however, when he is in the Fold preparing to leap forward in time. The other realms' frequencies follow a clear delineated pulsation; time is moving evenly for them, whereas his realm, and Clara's with it, are behaving as though they've been heavily caffeinated. The images from his home realm speed by him and it becomes impossible to re-enter only a year later, rather than three or four or five.