Lincoln turned to Skyra. Her huge nandup eyes were fixated on the battlefield. She was gripping her long, copper-colored hair with one hand, twisting the strands repeatedly around two fingers. Four days ago, when Lincoln had first met her, he had assumed this was a nervous habit, but now he knew it served a much darker purpose. She would often do this to keep her hand close to the stone blade of the khul hanging in the sling on her back. He had seen her wield the khul with deadly skill, and the resulting carnage was horrifying to witness. She now had two khuls in her sling, following a vicious fight with her tribemates, and Lincoln had hoped bringing Skyra with him on the jump back to his present time would mean she’d never have to use them again. However, this wasn’t his world—it was a nightmare, possibly worse than Skyra’s own brutal world 47,000 years in the past.
“Are you okay?” he asked for the third time.
Her eyes flicked toward his. “Why do you keep asking me that? I thought okay means I am good and happy. Right now my belly needs food and water, and my head does not understand where I am or how I got here. I did not walk to this place, but I am here.” She gestured toward the smoking battlefield. “Sometimes when I sleep I have bad visions of hurting and killing and fear, but I do not have sleep visions as terrible as what I see here. I am not okay, Lincoln. Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry.” Then he remembered Skyra didn’t understand sorry either. “I mean, I realize it’s a meaningless question. It’s just something my people say when we’re worried about someone.” He got to his feet. “We should get back to the T3—make sure my team is safe and figure out what to do next.”
“What to do next is to go away from this place.”
He nodded. “I hope we can.”
She stood and looked up toward the hill’s summit. “We will walk around the hill, not over it.”
“I agree,” he said, assuming she was thinking of whatever the Neanderthals had pointed at higher up the slope. He followed her gaze up the hill but saw nothing but cacti and thick brush.
They made their way around the hillside, taking advantage of available cover to avoid detection. The low area on the backside of the hill was more open, but they needed to cross it to return the way they had come. Lincoln picked up the pace.
Jogging now, they skirted around a thick patch of ocotillo-like plants. Lincoln abruptly came to a stop, and Skyra ran into his shoulder. They were almost face-to-face with a creature the size of a grizzly bear. The beast let out a growling moan and reared back, obviously startled.
Lincoln immediately backpedaled, then he turned to run.
Skyra grabbed his arm. “That is not a predator.”
He hesitated, struggling to control his flight instinct. The creature was standing on its back legs, its head at least eight feet off the ground, with its clawed forefeet held out in defense.
“What is it?” he stammered. Maybe the thing wasn’t a predator, but its claws were six inches long, and it looked like it could pick up a car if it wanted to.
“I do not know what it is. This is the place where you are from, Lincoln!”
“We didn’t have anything like this when I was here.”
The creature seemed to be frozen in place, like a grizzly about to attack a cowboy on his horse in one of those old western paintings. Its neck was much longer than a bear’s, though, and it had a thick tail it was using for stability, like a third leg. Its hind legs were massive pedestals upon club-like feet. It let out another moan, causing its lips to quiver and drip saliva. The creature then began lowering itself back to all fours, moving slowly, inch by inch. Finally, it folded its curved claws upward toward its belly and rested its weight on its knuckles.
“I’ll be damned,” Lincoln said. “I think it’s a giant sloth.”
“It smells bad,” Skyra said matter-of-factly.
She was right. The air already carried the stench from the battlefield, but the sloth’s wretched odor was pungent despite that. This may have been why the creature hadn’t already been killed for food to support the countless soldiers.
The sloth started backing away, clearly not in a hurry.
“We will get your tribemates and leave this place now,” Skyra said. She resumed walking toward the T3.
Lincoln glanced at the massive creature once more then caught up. He studied Skyra’s face for a moment as they started up the next hill. How could he possibly explain their situation without compounding her confusion?
“Here’s the problem,” he began. “The T3 is a device that takes us from one place to a different place.” There was probably no point in trying to explain that the T3 also took them to a different time. “We got inside the body bags, then the T3 took us from your homeland to this place, but the body bags stayed behind in your homeland. That’s how the T3 works—the body bags stay behind. Those bags are important. We can’t use the T3 to travel to a new place without them. We have extra body bags—enough to travel two more times, but that’s it. The bags will be gone, and we’ll be stuck forever in the place the T3 last took us. If we make a mistake and go somewhere dangerous, we’ll never be able to leave that place.”
She seemed to consider this. “We will make new body bags.”
“Those bags are impossible to make without specialized… well, we just can’t make them.”
“We will go back to my homeland and get the body bags that we left there. Then you will have more body bags.”
Lincoln shot her a glance. She was catching on quickly, although this idea wouldn’t work. “If we did that, we would have to leave body bags behind here in order to go there, then we’d have to leave bags there to come back here. We’d end up with the same number of bags. I suppose it’s possible just one of us could go back for the bags, in which case the person could retrieve the five bags then leave behind only two bags in your homeland—one for the person and one for the T3.” He shook his head at the thought. “There’s just too many things that could go wrong. The T3 itself would have to go with that person, which might result in stranding everyone else here. Not only that, but I’m not even sure the T3 will work a third time, let alone a fourth.”
They reached the hilltop, and Lincoln scanned the surrounding area. The battlefield was now hidden from view. This was fine with him—it was a sight he hoped he’d never witness again. They continued hiking back toward the T3 in relative silence. Lincoln struggled to rationalize why he had allowed Skyra to make the jump with him and his team. Yes, she had insisted, but what right did he have to remove her from her native time and place? He had known all along it would be impossible to return to his own timeline. After all, he was the one who had formulated the Temporal Bridge Theorem, which proved that jumping back in time created a new timeline—a new universe. It was impossible to go back in time then return to the same present you left behind. So, why had he been willing to bring Skyra into a future he knew nothing about, a future as likely to be a treacherous wasteland as a peaceful utopia?
At the time, he had justified it as trying to protect Skyra, or as simply granting her request. Deep down, though, he knew he wanted her with him. During four days of shared traumatic experiences in her homeland, in which they’d both nearly been killed numerous times, and in which Skyra had lost her twin sister to an act of brutality, he had developed an undeniable attraction to this Neanderthal woman. He was fascinated by every aspect of her, and he simply liked being with her. Basically, he had done something unforgivably selfish.