Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Two: In Which Jessie Is Unwell

I spent the next few hours wrapped in a blanket on the deck of the Lyre.

The horizon resolutely refused to get any closer.

Tease.

The shore – Africa? - on the other hand, was growing smaller and skinnier. We weren't sailing directly away from it. Instead we were skimming along the coast, but eventually the beaches and brakes gave way to the inward slope of the westerly retreating cliffs and we were more or less on the open water.

How long did I sit there? Long enough for my hair to get damp again from the spray, wet tendrils sticking to my forehead.

My own clothing was in a wet ball in Captain Goodenough's cabin, still. I was wearing instead a spare pair of the smallest cabin boy's britches and shirt, indecent enough that the Captain had implored me to stay in the unseen safety of his bunk.

We compromised with a thick blanket pulled tight around my shoulders.

Because I had to be outside. I had to see it. For myself. With my own eyes.

I was narrowly resisting the urge to look for hidden video cameras. Would a reality television show even be this morbidly detailed? There were no planes in the sky. No low-slung tankers in the water. Only me, the vast emptiness of the ocean, and underneath, behind, all around me, a nineteenth century ship with sails and ropes and crows nests, and everything. And a crew, too, all properly attired.

And in the water, scattered in a thousand tiny glimmering islets, the remains of my airplane. Acres of shrapnel and debris, stretching on to the horizon.

Yellow life vests, empty or buoying up the dead; seat cushions not quite soaked enough to sink away forever; the odd bobbing piece of overhead luggage; a laptop carrier just slipping beneath the waves; a child's doll with its plastic head filled with air, blankly staring with emotionless bead eyes; half-filled toiletry bottles, a bath-time floating picture book. A stewardess' hat, a cosmetics case, a piece of the wing.

I did not want to look, but I could not tear my eyes away.

Things that meant nothing to anyone but me. I, alone, among these hundreds, had survived. I alone had been pulled from the sea.

I wondered, maybe, if it would have been better if I had drowned. Like the rest of the twenty-first century that was present, so anachronistically here, out of place, superfluous, wrong.

We would all just vanish from history forever, lost to the future because we were laid at the bottom of the sea in the past. Never known. Never found.

The sailors stood beside me and doffed their caps and made no move to pick the dead out of the sea. I guess there was grave dirt enough at the bottom of the ocean for all. Or empty shark stomachs, at least.

Among my peers, the bloated white-faced drowned, were the dead of the battle Captain Goodenough had spoken of. Red and blue uniforms nearly black and indecipherable with the weight of the water, the stain of blood and gunpowder, the char of an on-deck fire. Ship pieces and broken planks, the ghostly billow of a sail still lashed to a bobbing mast. The very last of the battle-dead were giving up the gasses that had kept them afloat, or succumbing to the teeth of the blood-frenzied predators. The rest had already vanished below.

My conveyance, and any proof that I had that I was not when I belonged, would soon go with it.

Two things alone remained to remind me that I was real, and that this had really happened: my wallet and my cell phone. The battery had been frizzed by my plunge in the water, but had it not been, I was sure I wouldn't get any signal anyway. The papers and money – the Euros I had so carefully hoarded – were wet and beyond legible, obsolete. Only my plastic had survived; identification and credit cards I could never use or claim. That I should probably rightfully, like the responsible time travelers from the films I had known as a child, toss into the drink.